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Wow, so great to see this on the front page of HN! I work here, any questions, just ask!
by Seebeck 10y ago
Wow, so great to see this on the front page of HN! I work here, any questions, just ask!
- asadm 10y agoJust skimmed the article. Do you think this tech can be used to power phones too somehow in near future? I always imagined that in future, devices wouldn't need charging.
- Seebeck 10y agoRight now, even a low-end smartphone has power requirements that are about an order-of-magnitude too high for that to work, so we would probably need both better thermoelectrics (we're working on that!) and more power-efficient smartphones to close that gap. The other issue is that since, unlike a watch, you don't "wear" your phone on your skin, we would need a clever approach to collecting body heat, perhaps in concert with some kind of tether.
- jonahrd 10y agoDon't pockets get pretty warm?
- sbierwagen 10y agoIt depends on a temperature gradient. One side has to be warm, the other side has to be cold. If you put it in a pocket it stops generating power.
- rasz_pl 10y agotry 4 orders of magnitude
- bassislife 10y agoIf you are Seebeck, where are Peltier and Thomson? ;)
- z2 10y agoThis looks exciting! Did you consider solar at all, or were you always a thermoelectric group from the start? What was the thought process behind making a watch as your first product?
- Seebeck 10y agoWe've been a thermoelectric company from day one. We'd like to see thermoelectrics not only in wearbles, but also in smart sensors, medical devices, various IoT devices, etc. The watch just seemed like a good place to start because we would hear about people who would stop wearing them because they forgot to charge them.
- jscheel 10y agoAre you confident in generating enough power from the watch body alone, or are you evaluating the strap as a contact point as well?
- hyperpape 10y agoIf it requires temperature differentials so that the cold side of the watch is away from your skin, what happens when the external temperature gets somewhere above 90F/32C?
- Seebeck 10y agoThe technology is able to harness a temperature gradient regardless of its direction, but you're right that the larger the gradient the better it works.
- gnicholas 10y agoDo you expect to see different performance (and therefore adoption rates) in different regions of the US/world? Folks in sunny California saw optimal performance of their Tesla batteries, compared to folks in the chilly northeast—perhaps this is the flip side of the coin?
- rasz_pl 10y agohave you been suckered into equity instead of good wage? A good quality TEG should be able to sustain sharp memory LCD, but is that useful? Who wears watches anymore? People demand connectivity, you can forget any form of active transmission on recovered thermal energy of the body.
- stcredzero 10y agoHow about just operating a sensor, then using skin conduction to network with another worn device with a transmitter?
- rasz_pl 10y agoThe very fact you can buy $0.1 watch(heh) battery that would operate said potential sensor for _two years_ while being smaller makes this startup irrelevant.
- sbierwagen 10y agoHow much power do you actually get out of the TEM?
- blacksmith_tb 10y agoAlso, does the watch charge in any other way? I could imagine using the TEG to top off a normal usb or induction charge. Even if that only doubled the time between charges, that would be a significant improvement.
- jawns 10y agoDoes the side of the watch that's against your skin make your skin feel any different (e.g. colder)?