4 ms·

The promise of free energy for all is here? Instead of solar, everyone just needs antennas. While this sounds great on the surface, my gut feeling says the envi

The promise of free energy for all is here? Instead of solar, everyone just needs antennas. While this sounds great on the surface, my gut feeling says the environmental impact is bound to be catastrophic. After all it is high-frequency electromagnetic fields. I'm no expect in this field but I hope there is real (open) science done in this field vs corporate/vc backed science.

lxgr 6y ago
> The promise of free energy for all is here? Only if the towers are powered by themselves as well. > my gut feeling says the environmental impact is bound to be catastrophic Not to speak of the steep fines to be expected when violating the laws of thermodynamics that blatantly.
pbak 6y ago
That's great and all, but how the hell are you going to wireless beam-form a signal of sufficient strength back from the muC ? The activation energy of the transceiver by itself dwarfs whatever was stored for computation, not even taking the antenna into account...
- desktopninja 6y ago
  Mmm ... [Energy-harvesting card treats 5G networks as wireless power grids] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26643242
  - pbak 6y ago
    It doesn't have enough energy for that, precisely my point. Wireless beam forming demands a multiple antenna/DAC activation energy (even if just "listening" RF) two orders or three above the energy harvested for the muC as cited in these works. Even if we want to say schedule things correctly, it's very difficult in practice for commercially available muC's to keep accurate timer without skew in very low power modes for the once-a-day reactivation which will eat 99% of your condensator energy. If such a low activation energy specialised transceiver antenna exists commercially, I shudder at its price. And then of course the packet emission could fail to be received at that precise moment for any number of reasons. Beamforming is a high-power, high bandwidth, always-on high-computation sport, AFAIC.

lxgr 6y ago

> The promise of free energy for all is here? Only if the towers are powered by themselves as well. > my gut feeling says the environmental impact is bound to be catastrophic Not to speak of the steep fines to be expected when violating the laws of thermodynamics that blatantly.

pbak 6y ago

That's great and all, but how the hell are you going to wireless beam-form a signal of sufficient strength back from the muC ? The activation energy of the transceiver by itself dwarfs whatever was stored for computation, not even taking the antenna into account...

desktopninja 6y ago
Mmm ... [Energy-harvesting card treats 5G networks as wireless power grids] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26643242
- pbak 6y ago
  It doesn't have enough energy for that, precisely my point. Wireless beam forming demands a multiple antenna/DAC activation energy (even if just "listening" RF) two orders or three above the energy harvested for the muC as cited in these works. Even if we want to say schedule things correctly, it's very difficult in practice for commercially available muC's to keep accurate timer without skew in very low power modes for the once-a-day reactivation which will eat 99% of your condensator energy. If such a low activation energy specialised transceiver antenna exists commercially, I shudder at its price. And then of course the packet emission could fail to be received at that precise moment for any number of reasons. Beamforming is a high-power, high bandwidth, always-on high-computation sport, AFAIC.