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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.
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
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
It's not any one thing, it's the culimination of nonsense.
They are going to market in 3 months, but there's not even a prototype to show, that's crazy if you've ever done hardware design work. They just need $500K, that's outrageously low for hardware, I know software startups which eat 10x that. Hardware eats a lot of money in test alone. Their claims are outside the range and specs for the technologies they work with. Not outrageously so, but ... enough that eyebrows have to be raised. Their "technical details" carefully avoid explaining why any of it is possible, and instead give intellectual symbolic links to why it might work and secret sauce.
The things that are really dubious are the "shake to find" feature, which seems to be magical at best given how bluetooth works and what their claims are.
Then people are background checking the CEO and while this may or may not be trustworthy, his alleged linked in pages does not give him the credentials he claims. He's allegedly got patents on cold fusion... Add it all up, and you have to lean on the side of scam. Maybe he's a misunderstood genius, but he's going to have to prove it.
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
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.
RFIDs are charged by a special signal before reading, like EZ Pass. They only pass a few bits of data which requires very little energy, unlike Bluetooth which passes much more energy.
None of these use ambient Wi-Fi energy.
The concept is plausible. Just not under the conditions that they were supposedly going to operate under.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I invite you to read this thorough explanation of why *the iFInd* won't work
https://docs.google.com/docume...
"Oooh. I hate it when a paradigm shifts without a clutch"
Maybe he's a misunderstood genius, but he's going to have to prove it.
Well, that's just a ridiculous suggestion. How the heck is he supposed to do that when no one else in the world is smart enough to understand his invention???
;-)
RFID does not have the same power requirements Bluetooth does, the power requirements for Bluetooth are described in detail in the spec; it's not something you can get around. If nothing else, unlike RFID, Bluetooth does not have a totally unpowered "sleep" mode, that can be woken by the Bluetooth protocol itself. If your device is awake enough to receive any signal at all, it is drawing power. In fact, it's drawing very nearly the theoretical maximum you could harvest from ambient sources for the dimensions of the device they are describing... and then said device has to actually power up and send besides (not to mention the theoretical maximum is a good order of magnitude higher than what you'd see in real life usage).
There's a difference between "this concept is theoretically possible" (what you describe) and "this idea, as described and designed is workable in real life" (which is what the iFind people are, erroneously or fraudulently, arguing.
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.
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.
EZ Pass has a battery.
https://www.ezpassva.com/Stati...
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.
I saw a car driving on the Interstate between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Therefore to claim that it is impossible to drive a car to the moon is ridiculous.
You don't buy hardware from a factory a la carte. You commit to a production run, maybe 100k units, whatever entices the factory to give you time and absorb the headache of setting up the line. You make that money back as you sell, of course, but you have to make it.
And getting a factory set up to run 100k units is itself an issue, you normally have to do a low volume run to shake out the problems, maybe 1k units (usually on prototypes). That takes money, lots of airline trips, and you pay a premium on components (in their case, maybe some plastic and cheap pcb) for low volumes.
Hardware is expensive. Yes I know what you can do in your garage, I do that myself on far, far less. But when you start talking about mass producing goods you are also talking about hiring employees who don't work for free. 10 years ago we might assume a loaded headcount cost of $200k/engineer/year. It won't be easy to attract talent with imaginary stock options and promise of riches at this instant.
Even ignoring where they get their power from, they claim in 1 second rope mode it uses an average of 36 microamps of current, and can store enough energy to run 18 days without any charging source. That works out to 55 coulombs of charge... that seems like a lot of charge to store in something that is not a battery (and even if using a different voltage to store it, you don't gain much in terms of volume... either it is a 55 F super-capacitor at 1 V, or a 140 mF cap at 400 V, neither of which is as small and flat as their tag thing. That works out to about 15 mAh, which is getting kind of high even for a battery in that size (unless the tag thing is a lot thicker than it looks to me).
You can buy hardware from a factory a la carte. I've done it. There are quite a few companies doing prototyping services where you can do this for easily affordable sums of money.
I've had a small run (100 units) of an ethernet board I designed made in a factory. The board was a 100mm x 60mm 4 layer PCB. I supplied the gerbers and a BOM and a month later I had 100 boards back (I did put on the through hole parts myself). It cost me a couple of grand to do, they could do it cheaper than I could if I had ordered the parts off Farnell and soldered them onto the boards myself. Hardware is much easier to do today on a shoestring budget than it was even 5 years ago.
Now it's different if you're needing an ASIC - then you're looking into spending a couple of million. But off the shelf BTLE SoCs already exist.
The thing I find implausible about this Kickstarter is that they are attempting to break the laws of physics, not that you can't make a pretty decent sized prototype run on the funding they had.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows