This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Thin Air (fastcodesign.com) 60
An anonymous reader shares an article on Fast Co Design (edited and condensed for clarity): Researchers at University of Washington's Sensor Lab have created the WISP, or Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform: a combination sensor and computing chip that doesn't need a battery or a wired power source to operate. Instead, it sucks in radio waves emitted from a standard, off-the-shelf RFID reader -- the same technology that retail shops use to deter shoplifters -- and converts them into electricity. The WISP isn't designed to compete with the chips in your smartphone or your laptop. It has about the same clock speed as the processor in a Fitbit and similar functionality, including embedded accelerometers and temperature sensors. [...] It has about the same bandwidth as Bluetooth Low Energy mode, the wireless power-sipping technology which drives most Bluetooth speakers and wireless headphones.
RFID tags already do this (Score:5, Informative)
Re: RFID tags already do this (Score:1)
RFID tags are boring. Now we have an awesome tech with no use case, and that's something to get excited about!
But think of the possibilities -- you can be walking down the street, battery-less wristwatch, LED earrings, and backpack embedded speaker, while holding your RFID reader that you wave all over like spraying electricity on your gadgets (and inefficiently also in between and around your gadgets)
Can't wait for that future!
Imagine.... (Score:1)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! You could power an LED with them! Eventually the technology will scale, and we can clean up our EM pollution. Its win-win for the environment!
Re: (Score:2)
So what is new about this device? Capturing energy from RF was done over a century ago. Energy harvesting [wikipedia.org] for sensors and microcontrollers has been common for several decades. The only difference that I can see about this device is that it requires pairing with an RFID transmitter, while many other devices harvest from ambient sources, so that makes this device worse that what has been available for decades.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not a breakthrough but certainly doing something that should have been done years ago. Though RFID gets it's energy via radio we haven't had any CPU's that do it. This could power the equivalent of a fitbit without charging or a battery and that is at least new. It should have been done years ago.
There is so much RF energy out there in the WIFI spectrum I'm surprised it's taken this long to get a wifi powered CPU even if it has minuscule computing power. Afterall the arudino isn't going to win any compute c
Re:RFID tags already do this (Score:4, Insightful)
This could power the equivalent of a fitbit without charging or a battery and that is at least new. It should have been done years ago.
Probably not, unless you want to carry a RFID transmitter in your other hand.
There is so much RF energy out there in the WIFI spectrum
No there isn't. At a reasonable distance from an access point, you may get something like -70dBm, which is 100 picoWatt. Running something like an Arduino at low speed takes 1milliWatt, or 10 million times as much.
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, your right. You couldn't draw enough power from a single AP in a perfect conditions. Now if you could figure out how to reduce the numbers of APs so you could actually prove that.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes of course, even the summary explains that this is based on RFID tag technology. What's new here is the end-user programmability of these chips to do things OTHER than just respond with a fixed ID.
Arduino and Raspberry Pi aren't interesting because they do something new. They are limited in power and capabilities. What they do deliver is a significant amount of computing power at a very low cost and very small size.
While I don't see RFID-powered computers taking over the smarphone space, I do see the
Re: (Score:2)
So, you see the potential for things you haven't thought of? OK.
Re: (Score:2)
RFID tags use the energy from the reader to provide a RF response. This seemingly useless project is not exactly some breakthrough.
Yes.
Further, don't forget that battery-less AM radio from Heath-Kit (TM) that you built in the 1970s.
Also, Tesla's "wireless electricity distribution system" – from long before any of us were born.
"Air" (Score:5, Informative)
This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Radio Waves
Fixed.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Radio Waves
Fixed.
Yes. It is important to note that this technology will work in a total vacuum, which is the amount of information contained in the article.
Re: (Score:2)
This Battery-Free Antenna Receives Power From Radio Waves
Even more fixed
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
it would be CONSIDERABLY less expensive just to buy batteries for whatever it is you're trying to power with your WiFi.
WISP. (Score:2)
Not to be confused with WISP or wireless Internet service provider.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Those aren't adverts, they're targeted links. Totally different thing.
Re: (Score:2)
They've got two things confused. (Score:2)
They've got BlueTooth and BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) confused. That's not too surprising, since they're defined by the same organization, named as of the latter is a part of a latter version of the former rather than a separate thing, described in the same, 3,000+ page, poorly-written, standards document, modern chips do both (with separate "radios" internally), and these guys are NOT working with that protocol.
BlueTooth and BLE are very different protocols near the metal and on the air. And though they s
Looks like a weak chip, not a comptuer (Score:5, Interesting)
Funding, you say... (Score:2)
we are literally pulling energy out of thin air by mimicking plants.
Using light ray collectors that harness the sun's energy, we hope to transform tomorrow by revolutionizing energy collection today.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Someone's looking for funding. Stay away, as this technology is no where near being useful.
Seriously? This work, and the previous work by the same U.W. lab, look to me like one of the most exciting future developments.
Maybe I'm just too excited from the sci-fi books I read where they have "motes", tiny little sensors all over a room or building or landscape, that pick up anything and everything. We're not going to power those things with batteries. Every single one will have to harvest what it can from radio waves, eke out enough to do a small amount of computing, and crucially get a "free" way t
"Sucks" (Score:2)
Bathing in 900 MHz transmitter exhaust (Score:2)
This is like you putting stadium lighting in your living room to use a solar cell to charge your phone.
For those who care, this requires the widget to be in the main beam of a transmitter belching out 900 MHz (or lower, or higher) radio waves at sufficient power to be useful. See FCC Part 18 for details. I'd rather be on the back side of that antenna than living in the beam.
Re: (Score:3)
Um, no. (Score:2)
They had me at sucks.
What's the energy efficiency of the device? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Computer runs on power from ambient RF field (Score:1)
Similarly to how a crystal set works, that uses the ambient RF field to power itself, as invented around 1900. And it doesn't 'suck' anything out of the air, it absorbs rf energy through electro-magnetic induction. ref [arrl.org]
Old tech (Score:1)
I bought a couple of these early last year. Computers that are powered over nfc are common place. It's just a contactless smartcard *yawn*
This Machine Was Invented by John Galt (Score:1)
And Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are looking for him.
Invented by Tesla! (Score:1)
And that's how he powered his Pierce Arrow car.
All you need is somebody to transmit the power to you, for free.