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An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
- gboudrias 13y agoPaywall, can't get to the article.
- andrewljohnson 13y agoOpen an incognito window in Chrome - command-shift-n on a Mac.
- Kurtz79 13y agoOr delete "nytimes" cookies in your browser.
- jrochkind1 13y agoyou have to delete local storage too.
- galaktor 13y agomaybe the mobile link [1] works? i could read it just fine. [1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/technology/an-inventor-wants-one-less-wire-to-worry-about.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/technology/an-inventor-...
- pulakm 13y agoMirror: http://www.columbusceo.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/08/16/give-me-one-less-wire-to-worry-about.html http://www.columbusceo.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/0...
- gboudrias 13y agoThanks you.
- avjinder 13y agoJust type the article headline into Google and then open the website again. All articles going through Google aren't subjected to the paywall.
- HarryRotha 13y agogreat article. I wonder what the range can get to with this.
- zhemao 13y agoOr the power efficiency.
- ferongr 13y agoHow can one extract usable amounts of power out of sound? Even 100dB SPL has actual power around 1mW/m2.
- keithpeter 13y agoConcentrated beam I imagine. I wonder about heat generation locally.
- ferongr 13y agoIt's more likely that a somehow extremely directional soundwave would knock a phone off the table than provide any appreciable amount of power.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoThe ability to create a directional soundwave powerful enough to move specific objects from across the room would be a highly useful invention of its own, quite aside from remote power charging.
- marshray 13y agoIt's a laptop charger ... and a crowd control device!
- mattdeboard 13y agoWhat if we came up with a way to directly connect the device to the ubeam device? Like some kind of connecting wire through which the energy could travel? THEN we'd have some serious efficiency!
- sxp 13y agoA demo at All Things D 2 years ago: http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/ The design in that video involves transmitting ultrasound from a central charging station to an ultrasound receiver and that receiver is then plugged into a cell phone using a normal cable. The claim in that video is that it takes 3.3 hours to charge the receiver but she doesn't actually mention the watts or joules involved. Given that most claims of technology that can charge a device from across the room have turned out to be bullshit, I'm going to lump this claim of into the same bucket until there is more evidence to show otherwise.
- etrautmann 13y agoI'd be curious to see a graph of transmission efficiency vs. distance. The technology here is almost certainly acoustic beamforming, and that large square under wraps in the image is an array of small ultrasonic piezo speakers. Beamforming will give you better than 1/R^2 relationship between power and distance, but probably nowhere close to linear. I'd be hard pressed to imagine this working over distances larger than the 3 feet demonstrated, which suggests constraints on the use case, like charging your laptop while its on a desk, for which there would seem to be easier methods of wireless charging (inductive coupling, conductive pads, etc). Very interesting in concept, I'd like to see numbers before I believe anything.
- KingMob 13y agoSeriously. Given the existing levels of waste in our society and the associated environmental consequences, do we have any business switching to less efficient methods of power transmission? Unless this transmits as well as a cable, I'm not interested.
- tommoor 13y agoThe other thing is that this is probably still transmitting sound when there is nothing to charge? Which would be probably even more of a waste than any transmission efficiency
- javajosh 13y agoAt first I felt awful because I was thinking like part of the establishment: there's no way she came up with something that will replace power cords. I've got a degree in physics, and have always been interested in acoustics, and sound in air has some amazing properties, including the ability to transfer non-trivial amounts of power, especially at nodes, and especially when focused with, say, a parabolic reflector.. The best case would be a tracking parabola that follows your device through space beaming concentrated ultrasound at it, and even then the power transfer is going to be a handful of milliwatts. The power draw of modern laptops is around 10 watts (although it varies somewhat). This, of course, is the bet case ignoring inefficiency to transfer that mechanical energy back into electricity (piezo is probably really efficient, but coupling the sound to the piezo won't be). I was feeling really bad about myself, but then I realized: without such skepticism the surprise and delight of proving others wrong (not to mention being proved wrong) would be lessened, and so my skepticism does serve a useful purpose, and I could go on living with myself again. This is one skeptic who's hoping that he's wrong and that the inventor is right!
- Kurtz79 13y agoFunny, I was thinking that most people with an engineering/physics background would dismiss the though that spurred her to investigate the matter in the first place ("why in this day and age should I plug my "wireless" device to charge it") as just absurd, and drop the issue without a second thought... Wireless power is something that has been researched for years I believe, the fact that to this day there is not a feasible solution (that I know of) means that it's a really hard problem, I guess.
- glenra 13y agoI've had the same thought she had - that we shouldn't necessarily need to plug stuff in to charge it. My preferred solution - not an original idea - is to find a way to free-ride off existing broadcast signals. Right now, the world is full of radio-frequency devices pumping energy into the air. Find a way to convert some of that energy - the energy of the strongest available broadcast source in your area, whatever it happens to be - back into power. An old-fashioned crystal radio would tune into one strong radio station and use the power from that to amplify the broadcast of a weaker station with no battery required - that's our proof-of-concept. It's not a LOT of power, but if you were charging even a tiny drip all the time you wouldn't necessarily need very much.
- batbomb 13y agoNo, it's not a new idea. It's just being newly applied. I like this use of piezoelectric devices to turn heat into sound into energy: http://www.unews.utah.edu/old/p/053007-1.html http://www.unews.utah.edu/old/p/053007-1.html
- bnegreve 13y agoIt’s one thing to pull an idea out of your head and shape it into a prototype. But it’s a whole other thing to figure out how that device will get out of your test kitchen and into the marketplace. Hum... in this particular case, the problem is to make a prototype. If you have a working prototype for safe wireless energy transmission, no doubts that you'll find customers willing to buy it.
- tedsanders 13y agoEven if you had a working prototype, there's no way people will buy it until you can solve reliability, yield, cost, etc. A prototype that took 100 tries to make and cost $1000 and works only for a minute under the right conditions will never find a buyer. It's not enough to transmit wireless power - you need to transmit wireless power cheaply, reliably, safely, durably, etc.
- greenyoda 13y agoEspecially when what you're competing with is a conventional power supply that costs less than $10 to make, is small enough to carry in your luggage and can be used wherever there's an electrical outlet. (The device in the article is going to require an unobstructed path between the charger and the device to be charged, so it won't work very well in a place like a coffee shop where there are lots of bodies and furniture in the way.)
- nekopa 13y agoUnless they mount them on the ceiling...
- doctorpangloss 13y agoDid she have a hard time finding investors because it was a hardware business, or because she was a woman? Did she ultimately get investment because she was a woman, in spite of the hardware business? According to a friend's college thesis, there are lots of concrete reasons VCs don't invest in women.[0] In summary, VCs don't take a girl very seriously. The thesis makes the case though that there's real opportunity for women founders, not the least because they're so undervalued for reasons under than business fundamentals. So maybe Meredith got investment precisely because she was a woman. The collection of investors is curious. According to CrunchBase, Marissa Mayer invested in 8 companies over the last 2 years (+Square in 2009), 7 of which have women founders or co-founders. Lady Gaga's manager, who I thought was not a professional investor, in fact makes a lot of investments. According to CrunchBase, 4 of 16 of his investments have women founders or co-founders. By comparison, VentureSource shows about 1 in 14 startups with funding have women founders or co-founders in 2010—more details in Alisha's paper. Still, it would be wrong to accuse of sexism the "hundreds" of the investors who declined her project. She's an astrobiologist who wants to run a mass-manufacturing business. I'm not a venture capitalist, but I can see aversion to hardware manufacturing risk generally being the biggest factor here. [0] http://alisharamos.com/women-vc-funding/AlishaRamos_Thesis.pdf http://alisharamos.com/women-vc-funding/AlishaRamos_Thesis.p...
- zacharycohn 13y agoLady Gaga's manager is very active in the startup/tech community and is a known angel investor.
- doctorpangloss 13y agoCorrected, I didn't notice his name in the article. Still, he invests in a disproportionately high number of women-founded/co-founded companies, 4/16 as opposed to an average of 1/14 (by 2010 figures). See edits.
- foobarqux 13y agoAny hits?
- 13y ago
- svantana 13y agoI wonder about the health aspect of this. It seems there is very little known about long-term exposure to high intensity ultrasound. Also, there could be a risk of ear damage if a non-linear material came into the sound field, and producing distortion artifacts in the audible frequency range - given that about 1W/m^2 can be enough to cause damage.
- EEGuy 13y agoThis, svantana. My dentist's ultrasonic dental plaque removing tool produces audible squeals reminiscent of analog tuning of an AM radio. That's one possible example of probable nonlinearities (in my gums an teeth) producing detectible audible power from ultrasonic energy transmission. No reference -- it's just what I hear every time I have my teeth cleaned. Granted an ultrasonic water stream (dental application) has different physical characteristics than an ultrasonic air pressure wave (ultrasound).
- etrautmann 13y agoIt doesn't even have to be nonlinearities, could also be sidelobes of the fundamental ultrasound frequency. There's no reason to filter those out if it's not harmful, which I'd like to think was carefully verified.
- etrautmann 13y agoIt can't actually harm your hearing, by definition. Hearing damage caused by high intensity sound is the result of mechanical transduction of sound waves to hair cells in your inner ear. When the amplitude of a certain frequency is too high, the cells responsible for turning those mechanical vibrations into electrical signals are physically damaged. Ultrasound is mechanically filtered, so it can't propagate into your cochlea and damage the hair cells. This is in contrast to something like photons, where UV or infrared light can absolutely damage your photoreceptors in your eye.
- marshray 13y agoNo filter has an infinitely steep cutoff slope, it's a question of the 'degree' of attenuation. It may or may not be safe in practice, but if it is it's not "by definition". 50KHz is just two octaves above our normal range of hearing. She's claiming "charge laptop in 3.5 hours" levels of power transferred to a transducer "the size of a flash drive" a useful distance away. Now apply the inverse square law to estimate the necessary output power or assume a focused beam. Now imagine that flash drive is your ear, your eyeballs, or a pregnant lady.
- pbreit 13y agoFounders Fund on PR role with this and the Forbes article on Palantir.
- tocomment 13y agoHere's what I've been wondering. A transformer provides very efficient wireless power transmission but on a few centimeters. Has anyone considered scaling up a transformer? Would that increase the range? What if we made a house sized one and buried it under the house? Could that provide wireless electricity to the whole house?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alexhawdon 13y agoYou're talking about inductive charging, which is basically how electric toothbrushes charge. It's recently been built into new devices (my Nexus 4 supports it) but obviously requires they be placed on a charging mat/station. Perhaps in the future it could be built into desks, so that everything placed on them charges. I would imagine (but I'm no EE/physicist) that these get terribly inefficient when you scale them up.
- acadien 13y agoI've heard the palm-pixi charging stand (which can be easily hacked to charge many other cell phones[1]) gets roughly 70% efficiency. [1] http://hackaday.com/2013/06/19/adding-wireless-charging-to-any-phone/ http://hackaday.com/2013/06/19/adding-wireless-charging-to-a...
- nwh 13y agoYou'd still be battling the inverse square law. Wireless power is just too inefficient to ever be used for serious appliances.
- hkmurakami 13y agoMost of us here are discussing the science of this thing. But let's just say that the science somehow miraculously works. Would any of you actually want to buy that big square thing and put it in your rooms? I can't imagine I would.
- lreeves 13y agoIf it actually works it'll inevitably be miniaturized over time I'd imagine, pretty much like everything else in technology.
- greenyoda 13y agoElectronics have gotten miniaturized, but that doesn't mean that a mechanical device that generates sound vibrations can be miniaturized. For example, an iPhone contains the computing power that used to take up a large room, but we don't have loudspeakers that are 0.01 inches in diameter and deliver the same sound output as conventional ones.
- Gravityloss 13y agobut antennas have been miniaturized very well. (Frequencies have gotten somewhat higher, but it doesn't explain everything.)
- greenyoda 13y agoAntennas aren't mechanical devices; they don't need to transfer mechanical energy to air molecules. Also, their size is constrained by the power they need to emit as well as the wavelength of the signal, so we aren't going to see a cell phone antenna that's on the same scale as a transistor in an integrated circuit (tens of nanometers). An antenna that can only put out a microwatt of power won't be able to hit a cell tower that's a couple of miles away.
- THE_PUN_STOPS 13y agoYeah, like subwoofers and lenses? Certain classes of mechanical devices simply cannot be miniaturized like electronic devices can.
- iyulaev 13y agoDid anyone else read this and immediately wonder, "how many watts?" 1.5 pages of prose and no hard numbers. Years in the industry reading marketing white papers and such cause things like this to really set off the bullshit detector. I'm not saying it's not possible, but, just give me the power (in watts) that is being transmitted by a prototype device. If you don't put that number as a feature bullet, I automatically assume you've got something to hide.
- cma 13y agoI was wondering about the watts for a different reason... From Wikipedia: "Although the long term effects due to ultrasound exposure at diagnostic intensity are still unknown,[24] currently most doctors feel that the benefits to patients outweigh the risks.[25] The ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle has been advocated for an ultrasound examination — that is, keeping the scanning time and power settings as low as possible but consistent with diagnostic imaging — and that by that principle non-medical uses, which by definition are not necessary, are actively discouraged."
- VLM 13y agoI would imagine the doppler effects of beaming a couple watts at a low freq thru a ceiling fan would be humorous. Another interesting one is phase noise and distortion and crossover distortion (if you use a simple class-B amp) means you can send a sine wave into a high power amp, but the amplified noise level at audible range might be icky. As a personal anecdote I've noticed this with commercial ultrasonic cleaners. Sure... noise level might be 30 dB down at audible range, but pump a 100 watts at 40 KHz into it and I'm listening to 0.1 watts of noise at audible freqs which is quite loud indeed. Theoretically ultrasonic cleaners should be inaudible, but high powered ones are not. Much as intermod distortion is hilarious with high power RF, noisy/corroded/semi-faulty ultrasound could be loud as heck acoustically thru no fault of the generator, amp, or transducer.
- iyulaev 13y agoDid not consider this. Intermodulation and other distortion by-products are going to be difficult to control although I have no experience with the performance of modern amps for sub-MHz frequency ranges. Building a working prototype that can beam ~1W (or even 100mW) a few feet would be very interesting and would do a lot to lessen my skepticism.
- jotm 13y agoWhy not a desktop dock with multiple inductive coils (the kind used for smartphones)? Proven to work, cheap to make, (much) higher efficiency. Using acoustics seems weird, even lasers would be better :-)...
- aaron695 13y agoI cannot see in a world were we are trying to reduce energy use how wireless power is possible? Even if it's got some sort of feedback that allows it to be a highly concentrated beam between devices it still seems to me it'll be very lossy. Loss in the air. Loss in transforming the energy twice more than normal.
- bcoates 13y agoBatteries are both lossy and environmentally problematic objects to manufacture and dispose of. Also, a good fraction of all the energy used by society is spent hauling around energy storage. Wireless power would help fix both these issues even if it was fairly lossy compared to a copper wire.
- reedlaw 13y agoI doubt wireless power will catch up to the efficiency of battery power any time soon. Batteries have been around a long time and have the ability to time-offset local renewable energy resources such as solar power.
- badman_ting 13y agoI hate wires too, but sadly, I hate wireless technologies more. This one probably won't be an exception.
- armenarmen 13y agoI've always felt that computer chargers and cords would be one of the things that our grand children will laugh at us for.
- marshray 13y agoSome of our grandparents felt the same way.
- marshray 13y agoShouldn't it be "One Fewer Wire"? I'm not trying to troll with pedantry here, I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning that surely went on at the NYT.
- diydsp 13y agolol, irony: http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-less/ http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l... (BTW, since you were one of us who was reading carefully, how did you like this phrase: "it was almost like a stoner’s aha:" ?)
- marshray 13y agoHonestly, I couldn't read the second page of that article because I felt too badly about forming an impression of the (surely brilliant) Ms. Perry from it. The stoner quote was immortal, but I'll raise you: Nothing in her training prepared her for this kind of research. She was an astrobiologist, after all.
- espeed 13y ago"Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking." Keeping abreast of emerging tech is hard for specialists whom are focused deep within their silos. It's always good for teams to include broad-minded generalists that continually survey the landscape, connect the dots, and keep the team's reservoir stocked with fresh developments from the outside world. At some point a specialist may recall something from the reservoir that turns out to be the missing piece that enables your team to break through the silos and jump the curve.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adekok 13y ago> Afterward, she said, “I would go back to that person and he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that should work.’ ” Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking. I do a lot of cross-protocol work, and I've seen that a lot from "domain experts". Me: Why can't we just do X? Them: It would violate the standards, and industry practice! Me: how could anyone tell? Them: Uh... they couldn't. Good idea. Let's do it. There's a danger in letting your brain ossify. Cray used to hire young people for precisely this reason: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/tef/cray/tribute.html > Once asked why he often hires new graduates to help him with early R&D work, he replied, "Because they don't know that what I'm asking them to do is impossible, so they try."