Wireless Charging Start-Up Claims 30-Foot Radius 242
Lucas123 writes "At Disrupt this week, Ossia Inc. demonstrated for the first time its wireless charging technology that founder Hatem Zeine said has a 30-foot radius and, like WiFi, can charge through walls and 'around corners.' The technology, still in prototype phase, uses the same spectrum as other wireless standards, such as WiFi and Bluetooth. The Cota wireless charging system includes a charger and a receiver — either a dongle device or chip-tech integrated into a product, such as a smartphone or battery. While it has yet to be miniaturized, Zeine said the wireless technology will eventually be small enough to fit into a AAA battery or any portable electronic device. While the technology has wider industrial implications, as a consumer product, a charging unit will likely sell for around $100, he said."
Holy EMF Batman? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me or does this seem like a really bad idea?
Re:Holy EMF Batman? (Score:5, Funny)
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replying to negate a mis-click mod
Sorry
Re:Supercharging the cells with ions ! (Score:4, Interesting)
there are evidences of plants under WIFI frequency bombardments having retarded growth
Links or it didn't happen.
Links ! (Score:3, Interesting)
there are evidences of plants under WIFI frequency bombardments having retarded growth
Links or it didn't happen
Links, with pictures
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/05/can-wifi-signals-stunt-plant-growth/ [go.com]
http://www.mnn.com/health/healthy-spaces/blogs/student-science-experiment-finds-plants-wont-grow-near-wi-fi-router [mnn.com]
Now, satisfied ?
Re:Links ! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because the sun bombards us with far more of that crap than a 30mW router will.
Heres a nice summary [wikipedia.org]
Im not sure why radio isnt listed, but infrared, visible, and ultraviolet are all more energetic and "damaging" than radio waves.
The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter, which is composed of 527 watts of infrared radiation, 445 watts of visible light, and 32 watts of ultraviolet radiation.
So a few watts of power floating around your home is probably not that much to worry about.
Also, those two links you provided are both from primary school students--not even highschoolers-- so Im gonna say its probably not on the same level as the existing evidence against WiFi causing harm.
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We have some little GPS modules that work fine in bright sunlight but not when there is an RF source putting out 1mW waves in the sub-1GHz band. Just because something isn't harmed by terahertz range EM doesn't mean that other frequencies won't cause it problems.
I'm not saying those kids were right, merely that different frequency waves at different power levels have dramatically different effects.
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Excepting this study by grade-schoolers, there are no significant studies showing any sort of consistent effects from radio wave radiation, other than thermal.
Again: given the lack of both known mechanism and of any anecdotal evidence, its safe to assume that radio waves dont do anything.
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In order of energy: /m2 infrared, 470 W /m2 visible, and ~30 W /m2. The UV is doing damage to you. The infrared is not. Radio is even less energetic than that, so one might reason that (absent some hitherto undetected mechanism that has never been hypothesized) it would require a good deal more than 500 W /m2 of radio waves to cause any noticeable effects.
Radio Infrared visible UV
Sunlight consists of ~500 W
Re:Links ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. That was an *extremely* poorly controlled experiment by grade school students. Magically, no one else has produced similar results in an actual controlled study.
If your *only* evidence is a single experiment performed by individuals with barely rudimentary training in the sciences, you might want to consider that it is your bias causing you to readily accept the outlier as opposed to the norm.
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"Magically, no one else has produced similar results in an actual controlled study."
I don't know about you but I can't seem to find ANY studies besides the one done by the 9th graders on the effects of wifi on low order plants. There are a few on higher order plants (trees (maybe), corn, etc) with contradictory results, but nothing on more sensitive plant species (lichens, herb plants, etc). I might get a couple Chia Pets and try this out myself some time. The hard part as you suggest would be exactly re
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Just because something is done by 9th graders doesn't necessarily mean its flawed
The study isn't flawed because it was done by 9th graders. The study is flawed because it didn't control for a bunch of obvious things which would explain their result.
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Those kids didn't prove the sciences wrong, they investigated and called out the marketing department.
Look, I'm sure that somewhere a 14-year-old is capable of running a tightly controlled scientific experiment rigorous enough for a peer-reviewed journal. But the WiFi study doesn't look like it. They grew seeds on a sponge in the open air, and seem to only have only one control and one variable.
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Good, God man. You have a 4 digit Slashdot ID. I was hoping for something remotely scientific. Your first link shows something that looks like my kid would do for science fair, and indeed the first sentence is: "A Danish science experiment by a group of 9th-graders..."
But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say their experiment was scientifically sound. It took them 12 days to run it, and these stories are from May. Don't you think that someone might have reproduced their findings by now?
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From your link:
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The Danish experiment was the subject of extended debate on the Danish Engineer's Weekly newspaper (Ingeniøren). Many readers attempted to replicate the experiment, but success was extremely limited. Even the school itself did the exact same experiment again with the opposite result:
"Faktisk kan man her til aften måle at karsen er højst netop lige ud for routeren. I fredags kunne vi se at karsen længst fra routeren var lidt grønnere - end tæt på routeren. Men her til aften
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MMMmmm. Sausage links.
Do slowly frying people smell like bacon cooking?
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Wifi operates with radio waves. Do you have any idea how much radiowave, microwave, infrared, and ultraviolet radiation we are bombarded with every day? Or any idea that of those listed, none are ionizing (upper end of ultraviolet is, but is absorbed by atmosphere), and of those, only ultraviolet is more energetic than visible spectrum?
The only damage that we are aware of a cause for-- or aware of symptoms for-- is thermal damage if you were to jack the power up high enough to start cooking flesh. Absent
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Said difference is measured in
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No there's not. You just need about about 10 billion times more power.
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I was referring to the sun, which delivers around 1000W / m2 (according to wikipedia), and to parent's implication that wifi has significant biological effects (it does not, especially given that it is generally in the 30-100mW range-- around 0.01% of the sun's output on earth).
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We're talking about high enough intensity here to transmit 1 watt to an antenna that's about 44.5mm long. It's effective receiving area is limited because it has to be omnidirectional (due to size and use case). So it has an effective receiving area on the order or .0025 square meters of the 1200 odd square meters of area at 10 meters range from the power transmitter. Consequently, the transmitter must be putting out something like 1W * 1200m2 / .0025m2 = 480kW. Implausible. Has that cube the douchebag
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With that said, trying to mak
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10 meters is not near field at 5.8 GHz. That's the essence of why this won't work efficiently and as you say, it exposes all kinds of other things to high intensity radiation, which would cause myriad problems. This technology won't work, will probably never even be approved by the FCC (or any other country's regulatory agency) and anybody who invests in it is a fool.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]
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Its not omnidirectional, they use beamforming, and they demonstrated it working. You COULD have read the article instead of speculating, but there you go.
Re:Supercharging the cells with ions ! (Score:4, Informative)
What kind of super-ionization will it do to our body cells ?
None, because photons with energy on the order of 1-10 ueV don't ionize anything.
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I think this is the best idea I've seen since I've invented the death ray! I'm all pumped up about it!
Sincerely yours, Nikola Tesla
Re:Holy EMF Batman? (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is the best idea I've seen since I invented it almost 100 years ago! [wikipedia.org]
Sincerely yours, Nikola Tesla
FTFY.
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"Almost" == "more than"
Probably should have double checked that before hitting Post.
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There was a joke? ... aren't jokes supposed to be funny?
Re:Holy EMF Batman? (Score:4, Funny)
There was a joke? ... aren't jokes supposed to be funny?
Not since the advent of the internet.
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There was a joke? ... aren't jokes supposed to be funny?
Ah. Your uncertainty on that point probably explains your FTFY post, then.
Re:Holy EMF Batman? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well many homes already posess a 2.4GHz ISM band field generator, a few minor modification to the door interlock any you have just saved yourself $100.....
The trouble with shrinking this sort of thing is that it moves you from a near field situation, where coupling is largely magnetic, to a far field one where coupling is electromagnetic (Yes I know they both are really electromagnetic, bear with me), and that raises interesting questions of physics, and also of local power density close to the transmitter.
Now, there is also the health physics questions which for a non ionising EM field at 2.4Ghz come down to considering thermal effects. At 2.4Ghz this largely comes down to thermal effects in the skin and other surface layers (2.4GHz is used in microwave ovens for a reason, water has an absorbtion band there), the surface layer that **REALLY** matters in this is the eye! A few watts per square metre power flux density is probably not too much of a problem, much more might be.
I smell a startup about to try for some more funding!
73 M0HCN.
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Considering the amount of energy in sunlight, I really dont think a watt per square meter is really that big of a deal.
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Sunlight stops at your skin. And 1 watt per square meter isn't going to deliver the stated 1w of power to a charging device smaller than your pinky finger. It requires a local field intensity at the device being charged of well over 100 W/m2. That's not really a safe level for people or electronics. The device described is supposed to focus power from some sort of phased array of transmitters, so it wouldn't be that intense anywhere but near the device it's focused on.
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Sunlight consists of a LOT of different radiation, and a large portion of it is not visible.
. It requires a local field intensity at the device being charged of well over 100 W/m2. That's not really a safe level for people or electronics
Sunlight directly overhead delivers about 10x that, a lot of it in infrared and ultraviolet. UV alone is around 30W /m2.
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Now, there is also the health physics questions which for a non ionising EM field at 2.4Ghz come down to considering thermal effects. At 2.4Ghz this largely comes down to thermal effects in the skin and other surface layers (2.4GHz is used in microwave ovens for a reason, water has an absorbtion band there), the surface layer that **REALLY** matters in this is the eye! A few watts per square metre power flux density is probably not too much of a problem, much more might be.
What about modulated signals? We have hints of them when a mobile phone gets a call while being close to a speaker, but there may be unheard frequencies
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I rather smell some pretty bad science in your post.
Near field component of an RF field can be either magnetic or electric: it depends from the source type (electric dipole vs. current loop) and its polarization. IIRC some useful discussion on the topic can be found here [illinois.edu]. The near field becomes negligible with respect to the propagating wavefield at a distance of a few wavelengths: if indeed they use 2.4 GHz for their device, either it isn't a
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Safety? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're blasting ~2.4ghz RF from one place to another, what happens when something absorptive gets in the way? If it can charge a smart phone, is it enough energy to burn you if you get in the way, or start a fire if it happens to be going through a nail in your wall?
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It's 5.8 GHz... nothing absorbs that!
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Incorrect... If nothing absorbed it, you couldn't receive 5.8GHz Wifi signal. Conductors with a similar length to the wavelength or half wavelength will absorb it, that's how receiving antennas work, they usually either match the wavelength, half wavelength or quarter wavelength. The wavelength of an EM wave at 5.8GHz is around 5cm. If you have anything conductive with a length of around 1.2cm to 5cm, it will absorb power from a 5.8GHz signal.
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My attempts at humor are feeble.
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It just bounces around for an infinite period of time. Sometimes I wait a few minutes and then jump in the room with my laptop and get insanely high transfer speeds for a short time, just for the kick of it.
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Thank God someone around here picked up on that.
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It's impossible to say without getting numbers, which the article doesn't provide. However, I very much doubt a wall socket can supply sufficient power to cause burns fast enough that you wouldn't feel uncomfortable and move away first. A 100% efficient water heater takes everal minutes to boil a litre of water; your body is made mostly of water, so it
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If you're blasting ~2.4ghz RF from one place to another, what happens when something absorptive gets in the way?
Well, if I remember "The Avengers" correctly, you end up with a smoking charred spot where the person used to be.
Did anyone notice a dude in a bowler bat and a cute chick in leather hanging out at this conference?
So much for your noise floor (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, you were right the first time. 1 watt into 6db antenna = 36dbm = 4 watts erp. PtP systems can go higher with a 1db drop in power for each 3db increase in antenna gain. Still tis seems screwy. Enough power to charge a Li-Ion battery at more than 10 feet distance in less than a week would be of major health concern. Like disabling the lockouts and running your microwave oven with the door open.
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Indeed. I think this is just a clever fraud. Probably a button-cell hidden in one of the components on the demo-board.
With an omni-directional sender antenna, most (>99%) of the power would just be wasted. A highly directional sender would need tracker, servos, etc. and could never be brought down to $100 and would still blast most of the energy right past the receiver.
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I'm not sure how destructive it would be to other signals. Possibly not as destructive as you might think.
If it is transmitting a pure sine wave then wifi might not care since its clearly not data and isn't changing.
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your 2W carrier that has no data and my 100mW carrier that has important data can still interfere with each other.
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No, it's not omnidirectional, he's doing beam forming.
So he creates a 4W beam and aims it at the receiver. That's why when he moved the device, it went out; the beam was missing for a while until the transmitter figured it out and steered the beam to where he was now standing.
This works fine, provided the power density isn't too high; otherwise if people get in the way of the beam then they get heated up. A few watts may be the limit. more if the receiver is bigger.
scary (Score:5, Insightful)
with beamforming, one must remember that beamforming cannot focus in just one place, smaller but still constructive maxima will exist elsewhere. what wants 1/3 of a watt focused on their gonads accidentally?
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"Who wants 1/3 of a watt focused on their gonads accidentally?" What about intentionally?
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Anthony D. Weiner [wikipedia.org]
No, seriously, his middle initial really is D!
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Neon wand, baby. Like a tattoo machine but no permanent markings!
Wifi allergics are going to freak out (Score:4, Funny)
The tinfoil hat crowd is going to go ballistic when this technology becomes ubiquitous. I can't wait. I'm already thinking of witty one-liners.
Re:Wifi allergics are going to freak out (Score:5, Funny)
Very Bad (Score:2)
Re:Very Bad (Score:4, Funny)
Let's just say I wouldn't wear a red shirt around this thing...
Potential Snake Oil (Score:5, Informative)
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Remember, the key to a good perpetual motion machine is figuring out where/how to hide the batteries.
I say "nay" (Score:3)
Yes, but now we can't get Wi-Fi signal.
Also, how often is the "beacon" signal refreshed? Do I need to stand perfectly still while my device is recharging? Why is my skin peeling?
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* "It's like your WiFi signal" does not mean "It takes the place of your WiFi signal". It's called an analogy.
* That question is asked and answered in (at least) the video: The final receiver will be tracked continuously in the final product; the current behavior is mainly for demonstration purposes only.
* Next time, do a little a research and thinking before spouting off from the unproductive comfort of your armchair.
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Hi, I'm science, have we met?
No thanks, I will just use the neighbors (Score:2)
So how do you stop leakage and vampires?
You can't really encrypt a power signal.
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I take back the "you can't really encrypt a power signal". They are doing synthetic beam forming using spatial location as the coding to separate devices. The command and control channel will help the sender configure to location of the device to be charged.
Getting it to sum to 1W at only the selected location is not something they can guarantee without accurately mapping out the space. And doing it dynamically if there are people moving is something else.
Lots of trickey math and I doubt they can avoid a go
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No. (Score:2)
No. At least not in this implementation.
From the article:
"Cota is inherently safe, as safe as your Wi-Fi hub," Zeine said. "A Cota-enabled device sends out a beacon signal that finds paths to the charger, which in turn returns the power signal through only those open paths back to the receiver, avoiding people or anything that absorbs its energy."
Ok, so it has a two-way connection between the "transmitter" and "receiver". It wouldn't be hard to modulate the energy output levels from both devices to encode d
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Starts to make more sense....
From the Ossia Inc. LinkedIn page...
"Ossia is challenging people's imagination about what is possible with wireless power. Ossia's flagship product, Cota, redefines wireless power by safely delivering remote, targeted energy to devices as far away as 30 feet without line of site. Built on Ossia's patented smart antenna technology, Cota automatically keeps multiple devices charged without any user intervention, enabling an efficient and truly wire-free, powered-up world that is a
Ahead of the curve (Score:2)
WHY THE HELL IS MY MONEY STILL IN MY WALLET?!? (Score:2)
That is all.
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nads (Score:2)
Waldo (Score:3)
Remember the story "Waldo" by Heinlein
I don't think wireless power is a good idea.
Speaking of Waldo (and Magic, Inc) , Baen will be publishing it in ebook form April 2014. Buy it by March 15th to get it at the bundle price, also in the april bungle is Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber and Eric Flint and Upon a Sea of Stars by A. Bertram Chandler
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No. Where is he?
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Five seconds with google reveals the plot [wikipedia.org]. In the story it seems that widespread radiant power turns out to have unexpected and deleterious effects on people and equipment.
Multifunction device (Score:2)
The best thing about it is that it also works as a microwave oven and a tanning booth!
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That's far better than my comment. (But I got first post for the first time ever...)
Forget Charging (Score:2)
Bulk eraser? (Score:2)
Will it erase all the floppy disks and audio tapes in the house?
The actual tech (Score:5, Insightful)
I dug up what looks to be the main patent [ipexl.com] for the technology from 2008:
I don't know enough about antennas and E&M to evaluate that. Any help here? According to the articles it gets ~10% efficiency at 10 feet and receives (?) 1 watt at 30 feet.
On to the possible crank warning signs: ... computational linguistics"). No graduate degree or research career.
* According to his LinkedIn profile [linkedin.com], he's spent his whole career being a CEO and/or (later) doing software testing at Microsoft.
* He's identified as a physicist, but all he has to show for it is a bachelor's in physics from the University of Manchester (where he also "studied
* Twenty years after he gets his degree, having done nothing but software, he's suddenly producing miraculous hardware based on cutting-edge physics?
* Charger is hidden behind a curtain during a demo.
* Charger is six feet tall, but they're going to consumerize it to the size of a desktop PC in two years, when it will cost ~$100.
* Replacing all their off-the-shelf hardware with custom-built optimized hardware? No problem!
* Current fridge-sized charger has 200 transmitters, but when consumerized will have "20,000 transmitters in an 18-inch cube".
* The only public demo makes an iPhone declare itself to be charging. No electrical test equipment or data shown. No real evidence that it does anything.
* Claims the power goes through walls just like Wi-Fi, even though Wi-Fi signal strength can drop by orders of magnitude when it goes through walls.
* Charger only gets 10% efficiency from 10 feet away in open air, but this is never mentioned as an obstacle. Come to think of it, no technical obstacles are mentioned at all.
* This:
I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Maybe he's been doing physics and electronics as hobbies all this time, actually did come up with a workable idea, and used his management experience to drive the development of a real product. Maybe they really will have a commercialized version ready in a couple months and I'll have to eat crow. I just can't help but feel skeptical of people who announce their world-changing new product before it actually is a product.
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It might also be used to power-up devices that have the batteries removed for security measures.
And this company has ties to Microsoft (physically headquartered in Redmond since founding in 2008, in addition to the social/business connections). Considering the relationship between Microsoft and the NSA, this sounds like a sales pitch/market-softening effort to me. Who the target is for such an effort, I've no clue, but I have serious doubts this is about charging your damn phone.
Finally a post for which the tinfoil hat meme is truly appropriate!
Cancer rates soar (Score:2)
Efficiency? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if this technology works reliably, on which I have my doubts, (not to mention the potential health risks if this thing accidentally irradiates someone by mis-aiming its EM beam), did anyone there stop to consider the efficiency of sending power through EM bursts at receivers through 30 feet of air, plus a wall or three? Can you imagine just how much energy is wasted through dissipation? We don't need less efficient means of transporting electricity. Anybody who uses this thing is going to use 3 - 10 ti
Weellllllll (Score:3)
"Cota is inherently safe, as safe as your Wi-Fi hub," Zeine said. "A Cota-enabled device sends out a beacon signal that finds paths to the charger, which in turn returns the power signal through only those open paths back to the receiver, avoiding people or anything that absorbs its energy."
If I'm reading that at all correctly, this is using beamformed RF, especially since it must work in the Far field. Not much near field in this frequency range. And getting a watt of charging power in the far field needs beamforming or what the boys down at the shop call "A shitload of power."
So this device on your phone apparently"asks" for power. Then the main station sends it to the device. The miracle part is that the formed beam supposedly misses people, goes around corners, and performs other really sexy heretofore unknown RF majick.
Umm, how is this RF power going to "miss you" if you are using the phone?
Also, if you are using it and moving around the house, is it going to continuously follow you?
What if you have multiple devices in different parts of the house?
What if you are 31 feet away?
What if you leave the house? Going to have two different charging systems?
So much better to use a near field induction system if you really really have to have cordless charging. At least you'll remember where you put the phone.
Wow (Score:2)
Loss Leader (Score:2)
So, 90% loss of power used at 10 feet. But hey, at least I don't have to get up and walk over to that wall socket to charge my cellphone. Mind you, now my wireless doesn't work for some reason, so my phone's using a lot less power with no wi-fi active. Win-win!
"Despite the fact that no one’s heard of Ossia, the Cota prototype in its current form already managed to deliver power wirelessly to devices over distances of around 10 feet, delivering around 10 percent of the total original source power to r
Bad business concept (Score:2)
This whole idea is neat but just won't work. The premise is that there are lots of high-power devices out there which have really crappy battery life. Phone battery life is steadily improving and Qi etc. does just about everything you need.
These people are assuming that in 5 years phone battery life will be crappier than it is now and it will just be essential to have this.
The only thing this could be useful for is powering lots of little IOT devices, but I feel like this is just a really inefficient way
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Re:The "2.4 GHz resonance frequency" thing is a my (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be technically the resonant frequency of water, but there is something special about it:
The 2.45 GHz is a kind of useful average frequency. If the frequency was much higher then the waves would penetrate less well, lower frequencies would penetrate better but are absorbed only weakly and so once again the food would not absorb enough energy to cook well. [schoolphysics.co.uk]
My understanding is that the 2.4Ghz band was assigned for unlicensed use because it was already cluttered with things like microwave ovens and was, therefore, undesirable for licensed use.
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Transformers do #1 all the time in effect. #2, while theoretically possible it would be one hell of an air-core transformer and it would not be safe to be that close to it.. Tesla anyone?