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Energous Gets FCC Certification for WattUp Wire-Free Charging Technology
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Do you understand the difference in signal level between "enough to transfer information" and "enough to transfer useful recoverable amounts of energy"?
How much of the emmited energy is actually cought and used by the devices? Is there any significant vaste? How much energy is used in standby?
As a stockholder this makes me quite happy. As in early retirement happy
Also, even at a 3ft distance this is a HUGE deal. Exciting times.
Also, even at a 3ft distance this is a HUGE deal. Exciting times.
And security risk, electrical hazard and such.
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This is the point of this invention.
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Or even crazier, charge sunlight tax.
Nope, cell towers neither need nor use 100-500+ watt transmitters to cover their relatively small radius arc area.
The number you're seeing in those tower maps and on many sites is the Effective Radiated Power (ERP), which is a number describing antenna efficiency, not the actual power output, which as I stated is more like 5-10 watts.
http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/transfer/FCC_Doc_1.html
Remember that the same goes for cell phones, which often use less than their max 3 watts to talk back to that same tower. (If towers needed 500W to talk to a phone, a phone would need the same to talk back, but of course it doesn't.)
Height and line of sight, along with frequency, are far more important than power to a cell tower.
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Sadly, MacRumors MISSED the bigger and more important story
http://iphone.appleinsider.com/arti...g-of-consumer-electronics-at-an-80-foot-range
http://iphone.appleinsider.com/arti...g-of-consumer-electronics-at-an-80-foot-range
These companies exist and are led by "non-experts" solely to soak up the investment money of hopeful venture capitalists.
Like Ubeam who I cannot reasonably believe has spent the last 5 years working on something that's apparently so simple, someone who knows next to nothing of physics or engineering can figure it out.
They did get something like $28 million in investment, though.
Like Ubeam who I cannot reasonably believe has spent the last 5 years working on something that's apparently so simple, someone who knows next to nothing of physics or engineering can figure it out.
They did get something like $28 million in investment, though.
Two thoughts,
First: is anyone worried about the long term effects of this?
Second: that’s so awesome! I want a wireless future!!
First: is anyone worried about the long term effects of this?
Second: that’s so awesome! I want a wireless future!!
Sadly, MacRumors MISSED the bigger and more important story
http://iphone.appleinsider.com/arti...g-of-consumer-electronics-at-an-80-foot-range
Thanks for that. Powercast was formed in 2003 and started selling their wirelessly powered sensors in 2010, along with a power+data base station.
Their recently announced on-demand consumer power transmit station is smaller than Energous' one, with less power (Energous starts with 10W, whereas Powercast starts with 0.5W). However, even the Powercast manual has this:
In other words, don't put one in the crib to power Junior's baby monitor
Like other companies selling wireless power solutions, you won't find any hard specs on their website giving a chart of actual power amounts at varying distances.
But at least they do sell actual working parts and dev kits that clue us in, as they use Extreme Low Power cpu chips as demos. And I mean extreme. We're talking wirelessly powered devices with microcpus using only 10 nano-amps (!) in standby, and just 30 micro-amps when running at 1 MHz. Far, far less than a milliamp.
So I suspect they would want anyone building the small devices they claim they can remotely charge (mice, watches, headphones), to likewise have very low power requirements. Which is fine, but people should not expect this station to charge phones or laptops. It looks like they're targeting things that need to recharge ~50-400 mAh overnight.
Note also that they're really only claiming two feet for larger battery devices. The "80 foot" claim is for their remote sensors which are more like RFID cards. The sensors use a capacitor to slowly accumulate a received wireless charge, and then whenever they have stored enough, they transmit a microburst of data and fall asleep again.
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It’s funny that ome people here in this forum thinks that this technology is owned by Apple. They’re not for sale and they surely not valued less than Beats imo. Apple probably tried to but it but they’re too cheap to realize value. Plus Timmy likes to sell more flimsy lightning cable so she can make board happy with their pocket.
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[doublepost=1514544503][/doublepost]A lot of posters dont understand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. RF waves are non-ionizing. The biggest risk is the thermal heat they generate.
At 5ghz like Energous, the waves do not penetrate the body. The biggest risk is thermal exposure of the eyes, which has been shown by research to lead to cataracts forming. Powercast at 900mhz will have more penetration but the signal is far weaker.
RF wireless charging like Energous does is never going to be anywhere near efficient to charge a phone as wired charging does, but it has its uses since the RF receiver chip is relatively cheap. This means you can implement it cheapely and easily. In the near future your remotes, controllers and maybe even your small kitchen and bathroom appliances can be charged conveniently this way.
For smartphones it will not be more than trickle charging, keeping your battery level constant.
[doublepost=1514544503][/doublepost]A lot of posters dont understand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. RF waves are non-ionizing. The biggest risk is the thermal heat they generate.
At 5ghz like Energous, the waves do not penetrate the body. The biggest risk is thermal exposure of the eyes, which has been shown by research to lead to cataracts forming. Powercast at 900mhz will have more penetration but the signal is far weaker.
RF wireless charging like Energous does is never going to be anywhere near efficient to charge a phone as wired charging does, but it has its uses since the RF receiver chip is relatively cheap. This means you can implement it cheapely and easily. In the near future your remotes, controllers and maybe even your small kitchen and bathroom appliances can be charged conveniently this way.
For smartphones it will not be more than trickle charging, keeping your battery level constant.
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Exactly.
Note that the latest Energous midrange (3 ft) device that is the subject of ths thread, also uses ~900 MHz.
In the best case, if you hang this enormous thing a foot off the table pointing down, you'll get something like 3% of the charging current you get from an inductive pad. This is not a viable technology...
The MS300 transmitter is two and a half feet across and a foot deep with a range of 3 feet within a ±35° arc. It's considered dangerous to get within 2 feet of the transmitter so, while it will charge a device at that range, it will cut off if it detects anything moving or breathing within that space.
The Part 18 filing doesn't give much detail on charging currents, but according to the SAR report, it has a field density of about 75V/m at 85cm, or about 75^2/377 = 15W/m^2
The iPhone 8 has a surface area of about 0.0673*0.1384 = 0.01 m^2
So, if the entire surface of an iPhone 8 was covered with an Energous antenna, you manage to center it in one of several discrete charging pockets, and the antenna efficiency was 1 (impossibly good, but for arguments sake), it would pull something like 150mW.
It wasn't tested within 40cm of the source, but at 40cm the best case power is around 21W/m^2, or best case charge current of 210mW.
Oh, and they make this point as well: "Sufficient power will not be received with the back or edges of the [device being charged] facing the MS300". So it won't work with the phone laying flat in front of it. In order to get those field strengths, they had to test it like this:
That suggests that the only real workable orientation would be to place the transmitter above or below the phone where it's charging. They mention a self check for the motion detectors without going into detail, but earlier filings suggested it won't work without line of sight (they're probably ultrasound). So under the table isn't going to work. That leaves hanging the two and a half foot long Energous charger about a foot above the table you want to charge on so that in a perfect world you can get about 3% of the charging power you'd get from one of those inductive pads people seem to think are so burdensome.
The MS300 transmitter is two and a half feet across and a foot deep with a range of 3 feet within a ±35° arc. It's considered dangerous to get within 2 feet of the transmitter so, while it will charge a device at that range, it will cut off if it detects anything moving or breathing within that space.
The Part 18 filing doesn't give much detail on charging currents, but according to the SAR report, it has a field density of about 75V/m at 85cm, or about 75^2/377 = 15W/m^2
The iPhone 8 has a surface area of about 0.0673*0.1384 = 0.01 m^2
So, if the entire surface of an iPhone 8 was covered with an Energous antenna, you manage to center it in one of several discrete charging pockets, and the antenna efficiency was 1 (impossibly good, but for arguments sake), it would pull something like 150mW.
It wasn't tested within 40cm of the source, but at 40cm the best case power is around 21W/m^2, or best case charge current of 210mW.
Oh, and they make this point as well: "Sufficient power will not be received with the back or edges of the [device being charged] facing the MS300". So it won't work with the phone laying flat in front of it. In order to get those field strengths, they had to test it like this:
That suggests that the only real workable orientation would be to place the transmitter above or below the phone where it's charging. They mention a self check for the motion detectors without going into detail, but earlier filings suggested it won't work without line of sight (they're probably ultrasound). So under the table isn't going to work. That leaves hanging the two and a half foot long Energous charger about a foot above the table you want to charge on so that in a perfect world you can get about 3% of the charging power you'd get from one of those inductive pads people seem to think are so burdensome.
I don't know why MR insists on posting every time Energous issues a press release, but it's giving unfounded credence to a failed concept. All I see anymore is CEO pulling something along the lines of $5M a year from a small startup with little chance of success.
You can probably do just as well by shorting it now... [I'm not qualified to give investment advice, seek the advice of an investment professional, etc, etc...]Man, their stock skyrocketed, I shouldn’t have sold it...
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Actually heat is not at all the greatest danger. It is the positive ions that harm the eyes and every other cell of the body for that matter. The pupils of our eyes rely on negative oxygen ions to keep the glutathione "reduced." But when more positive ions are added to the air, they intercept those negative ions making for fewer ions to be available for our eyes. Failure to repair/reduce the glutathione will promote cataracts.
It's guaranteed that this product will cause a spike in cataracts among those exposed to them for any length of time on a regular basis due to the "ion intercept."
This product has to be one of the most dangerous ever invented for consumer use. I'd be appalled, except that the inventors surely are not aware of the harm their products will cause. The harm doesn't stop at the eyes either, but we'll leave it there.
I'd venture a guess it'll have to get in line for that award behind, say, cigarettes, booze, leaded gasoline and lead-based paint, for starters, not to mention crazy things like radium and thoruium-laced toothpaste, drinking water, and eye drops. Energous isn't too dangerous, because they'll never get useful charge levels at distances people would demand from such a system, so they're basically just a furnace for burning investor capital, that won't lead to an actual product.
Cigarettes, which might be the worst on the list, typically takes 20 to 40 years to cause cancer because it is a metabolic pathway. The ions from electronics are electrical. Electrical processes tend to turn things off in an instant. When every one of our cell channels are potential victims and we have probably 300 trillion of them with four for each cell, the outcomes are extremely wide ranging and potentially dramatic.
The only limitation is that, thank God, we don't absorb 300 trillion positive ions each second. The effect is more like shutting off increasing numbers because when a cell channel gets shut down to often there are undoubtedly metabolic malfunctions that occur as well.
A major one would be our ATP-Mg. ATP-Mg is our powerhouse energy source. Reduce it and our energy drops producing fatigue. Fatigue is so rampant that it is the #1 complaint doctors hear about from their patients.
With three feet being the distance where a device can be recharged, it means the ions are going further than three feet. This characteristic spells utter disaster for anyone exposed to them on even a semi regular basis.