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Funding for iFind Kickstarter Suspended
An anonymous reader writes As of approximately 9AM PDT, funding for the iFind project at Kickstarter, the one with the bluetooth tags that have no battery and that harvest energy from WiFi and other radio sources, has been suspended. No word yet on how this came about.
Not an unexpected outcome since their claims of harvesting enough energy for a Bluetooth beacon from ambient wireless signals looked pretty far-fetched.
so it's self-delusion or fraud. you would have to be three tower rungs below a broadcast antenna to harvest enough power, and you'd get very, very fried.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
WOOOOO! Spin spin sugar WOOOOOO
It all starts at 0
Are these folks now in some country the US does not have an extradition treaty with?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
If you can harvest enough energy from radio waves to operate a radio receiver, why couldn't you add in enough capacitors to drive an intermittent Bluetooth beacon?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I'm pretty sure it's based more on people being able to smell bullshit...with a good dose of far-fetched added.
Slashdot was mentioned prominently in the comments for the project once it hit the front page.
I followed the posts that day (Tuesday?) and comments were much more lively than before that point.
BlameBillCosby.com
For comparison, an RFID reader has the same FCC-imposed limits as WiFi, an EIRP of 4W (or put another way, a 1W transmitter with a typical 6dBi antenna).
RFID readers are also generally bigger than a cell phone, utilize a protocol developed specifically for low power(Bluetooth is incredibly complex and high-powered in comparison, actually doing handshakes and stuff), don't do any more than transmit a number(essentially), and work at ranges a whole lot less than 200 meters.
If we could build a wireless power receiver that doesn't need a specific power transmitter that can transmit powerfully enough to be heard at a couple hundred meters into something the size of a dime ALL small consumer devices would be looking to use it. Bye-bye chargers for the most part would only be the first step.
I don't read AC A human right
If I read it right, they're claiming that their devices can collect more energy than exists. They're claiming to collect 10 units of energy from an array of devices that put out one unit of energy. (Obviously, I'm dumbening it down a lot.)
Reality doesn't work that way.
The problem is it's not RFID. They state it is bluetooth. Further more they claim functionality not even possible/correct with Rope etc. BTLE uses around 0.15 mW or 150 W according to a overview by DigiKey and according to Powercast and their P2110 Powerharvester you can get a few 10's of microwatts from a 3W transmitter at around 40 feet. This tells me it's not fesible.
Just implausible *under the conditions stated for the product* (size, materials,available technology)
"Oooh. I hate it when a paradigm shifts without a clutch"
Impossible is generally a strong word that should be avoided but there are many huge fundamental differences between BT and RFID that make using it as a baseline for their claims...well....impossible.
RFID tags don't broadcast in the traditional sense. They basically short out their antenna. When the antenna is active it absorbs some incident energy from the reader, when its shorted it reflects it. The reader can pick up the difference. An RFID reader is also highly directional compared to a wifi router or BT dongle. And instead of sending a message with a couple of bits you have all of the BT overhead to deal with that has to go out through a real transceiver. Even low power BT chips need 10's of mW whereas RFID is in the low uW range.
As other people have stated, Bluetooth is not RFID, the power requirements are different by a couple orders of magnitude (don't quote me, lets just say they're significantly different). Passive RFID do not require power to listen for an incoming signal, Bluetooth does. RFID has an extremely limited range, making it's use as a "finder" pretty much worthless. Bluetooth sends and receives many times more data at many times higher speed.
If phones had active RFID scanners or even Zigbee hardware, it might be possible to make something like this work, with Bluetooth it's physically impossible.
The iFind project stunk of a pseudoscientific scam from the outset. Ignoring WeTag's laughable claims of the iFind being able to harvest any usable amount of energy from a device that small (RF harvesting circuits either need big antennas or to have RF energy beamed right at them), consider the biography of the so-called "Dr. Paul McArthur":
A bachelor of science degree in "Electronics and Microprocessor Design"? That's like earning a degree in "Computer Programming and Windows Apps". Pseudoscientists love to claim academic credentials, but always seem to screw up the details, because they want their credentials to sound as impressive as possible. And on the flip side, they'll never tell you where their degrees supposedly came from.
Then there's the matter of the Ph.D. and the M.D. degrees, both earned by the age of 28 while he was working full-time as an RF design engineer. Really? So did he start when he was 12 years old? And I guess he never slept? And of course you could ask the obvious questions, such as:
(1) "Dr. McArthur, what schools did you earn your graduate degrees at? And what years did you earn them?"
(2) "Dr. McArthur, can you point us to the references for the journal articles that you published as part of your Ph.D. degree?"
Not that you would ever get an answer, because "Dr. McArthur" is a fake. He was clever enough to pick a name that was less obvious than "John Smith", but still essentially impossible to track down using web searches.
If you look into "free energy" scams, you'll find people like "Dr. McArthur" everywhere. Some of them buy fake degrees from diploma mills, and others just make up their educational credentials wholesale. If you ever find yourself dealing with someone who touts his credentials but won't give you a straight answer where and when he got them, then you can be certain you're dealing with a fraud or a pseudoscientist.
Yes, I suppose you could drive an intermittent Bluetooth beacon, but I read somewhere else that Apple requires check-ins every three seconds.
To be fair Bluetooth Low Energy cuts out most of the protocol stuff. Obviously the range claims and power budget are still nonsense, but BTLE has gone a long way towards making low power sensor type applications possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nobody is debating whether current can be induced by a changing magnetic field.... It takes more than just doing to invalidate the first law of thermodynamics.
Mobile wifi is limited to 1w eirp (250mw with 6dbi antenna gain), not 4. In practice the transmitters are less powerful than the limit. Furthermore, they are not constantly transmitting at full power.
Build an RFID reader into your iphone bumper case. That way you won't lose it and the RFID reader can read RFID tags without requiring the RFID tags to have power.
Yes, they were talking about bluetooth which is stupid. But this seems entirely plausible if you use RFID instead.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Here's what has been sent to backers in email from Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating/comments?cursor=7108319#comment-7108318). I haven't found any additional information from Kickstarter.
Hello,
This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include:
A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners
Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part.
We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message.
Regards,
Kickstarter Trust & Safety
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As far as I know, the device (if it actually could work) would be illegal in most of Europe. Charging a device with the EM waves sent by other devices is considered energy theft and thus forbidden. In the 1960ies, devices charged by radiowaves from a nearby radio tower were a constant theme in the electronic magazines, but later, this was forbidden, as it actually forces the radio tower to increase the emitted amount of energy to compensate for the loss due to the charging device.
Their other technical note mentioned it could operate in rope mode for 18 days straight on a single charge using the same internal storage they talk there. Assuming a really low power bluetooth chip using 10 mW of power during transmit for the minimum 3 ms bluetooth blip (which wouldn't get the 200 ft range with they are suggesting...), you would need a ~0.5 mF, 400 V capacitor to store that energy which are typically on the size order of ~4 cm cube (or alternatively a ~40 F, 2 V supercap which is about the same size).
OK, I understand all those people who pledged had C on physics. But why the hell Kickstarter that claims they are checking incoming projects allowed it?
It's physically impossible because the power they need is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the power they're going to get. It's as simple as that. Passive RFID works because the power it needs is on par with available power. Again, it's just that simple.
So, as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. What they have is not passive RFID.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Passive RFID works in very much the same way as what this Kickstarter describes. An RF pulse gives it just enough juice to do a miniscule amount of processing (looking up a stored number), then broadcast it back out to the world. Yes, capturing background RF would take some doing, but I don't know that I'd call it all that far outside the realm of plausibility.
The difference is distance; RFID only works with the reader very close to the tag (or with a large, directional antenna). Remember that RF strength decreases by the square of the distance (inverse-square law) and even just a few cm away from the reader RFID tags stop working. These iFind tags would be receiving even less energy than that, and if you can't power an RFID tag with that you're not going to be able to power an active Bluetooth device either.
If you do some Googling for a Paul McArthur locator patent, you get two patents. That doesn't say he exist, but if he doesn't, somebody's gone to an awful lot of trouble to pretend he does, as one of these patents were filed 12 years ago (not Bluetooth at the time, obviously.)