10 ms·
Google offering $1M prize for a much smaller power inverter
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- buro9 13y agoA power inverter is to go from DC (battery/solar source) to AC. Dart is just a power adaptor. Edit: Parent has been deleted, but the question was whether Dart (a Kickstarter project to make a small power adaptor) could apply.
- naterator 13y agoIndeed, here was the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215201435/dart-the-worlds-smallest-laptop-adapter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215201435/dart-the-worl...
- dylandrop 13y agoI feel like making a much smaller power inverter would be worth a hell of a lot more than $1M.
- eurleif 13y agoWell, it's not clear whether Google is buying the rights to the product with their $1MM, or if they're just offering the prize to spur innovation.
- emiliobumachar 13y agoEverything is much cheaper at "hand us the prints and prototype, than take the cash" terms than if you also built a working company to monetize it.
- elinchrome 13y agoIt reminds me of that show Silicon Valley where the Hooli (Google) guy offers him $10m for his algorithm, but he decides to go it alone for the chance of big bucks.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoTo the inventor? Perhaps, but there is a great deal of risk and additional work involved. Most inventors take the easy route rather than trying to market and sell their inventions themselves. However, there is a lot of risk involved in doing so. Risk that your idea won't actually translate into a workable invention. Business risk, and so on. With an easy payday in sight there is a greater incentive for people to spend their spare time working on such things, if they have domain expertise. In contrast, working on their own they'd have to contend with the risk that their invention won't actually have as much of a market as they thought or that they wouldn't be able to monetize it very effectively, and so on. With a prize a lot of that risk becomes less important, and shifted onto google's plate instead of the inventor's. Also, google isn't necessarily depriving the inventor of patent/licensing rights, the $1M dollar prize is likely just the beginning of monetary return for the invention.
- naterator 13y agoIsn't this the type of thing a place like Bell Labs would, or Google X should, be on top of? And not fruitlessly rehashing the space elevator idea?
- melling 13y agoIt's probably a lot cheaper to crowd source the solution. You'll get a lot more effort for the money. Crowd sourcing a problem for a prize is a well proven method that's centuries old. Here are some famous examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis And of course, the modern X-Prizes: http://x-prize.com http://x-prize.com The one improvement would be to crowd-source the challenges and the money. Think KickStarter but participants vote for the projects and donate the prize money.
- mfkp 13y ago"WATCH THIS SPACE FOR MORE DETAILS SOON." No, I'm not going to keep refreshing this page every day to check for updates.
- ajkjk 13y agoIt's a lot like if they had written "We'll post more updates soon.", only you managed to get annoyed at it.
- teach 13y agoYou won't have to. Once there's new information, you can bet it'll be on HN again. (And probably TechCrunch.)
- paul_f 13y agoApparently there are services that will track web page changes for you. Who knew? http://www.changedetection.com/ http://www.changedetection.com/
- jeena 13y agoI wish they would have added a RSS/Atom feed.
- greglindahl 13y agopage2rss.com
- kalleboo 13y agoIt's Google, they would have made a Google+ page.
- pliu 13y agoNot even for a million bucks? I feel like the intended audience will be interested enough to come back later.
- rrmm 13y agoIt's hard to tell if one is even in the intended audience. A smaller inverter? What are the specs on the current one...how much improvement is necessary...how long does it need to last? Do I need access to a semiconductor fab? I can sort of infer what they're asking for since they're not making a deal with LTC or maxim or lambda or whomever, but it's a bit annoying to have to standby while google starts the hype train.
- keenerd 13y agoAlright, something that is almost my day job. I can make you one as small as you want. How many microamps do you need?
- eigenvector 13y agoGiven the relative simplicity of scaling down existing designs for lower current ratings, one would assume that Google is looking to achieve reduced heat dissipation (<=> increased conversion efficiency) from existing designs at a given current rating, resulting in a higher kVA/m^3 value. There are few immediately obvious ways to attempt this, but all of them involve trade-offs in either cost, THD or operating flexibility. It'll be interesting to see what the full requirements are.
- raverbashing 13y agoThat's the relevant question "I want a small inverter" ok, what are the specs? Maybe they need 1000v / 1ma (probably not, still...)
- ars 13y agoProbably something in the 50A range.
- drakaal 13y agoAnd if it is worth $1m to Google think how much it is worth to you. This is the opposite of a good deal. Build something that is probably worth $250M and get $1m for it.
- tls 13y agoIt's a great recruiting tool. Plus the possibilities of how it will scale for projects like robotics/fiber/wifi etc... who wouldnt want an inside track like that?
- TTPrograms 13y agoThere's also no evidence that google would own the tech after it's built. It doesn't have to be either $250M or $1M - it could be $251M.
- femto 13y agoThe problem with building the world's best power inverter in your garage is: Who do you sell it to? It's only worth $250M if you can connect with the buyer who is prepared to spend that much. The real value with something like a $1M prize is that it will lead to interest from people who are prepared to pay $250M. $1M for non-exclusive rights may be cheap for Google, but it is probably still good value for the inventor if it leads to bigger things.
- jussij 13y ago> Who do you sell it to? I would assume if you actually did build it in the garage and it worked, the next step would be to get a patent and after that go talk to a venture capitalist. Strangely enough, probably not much different to the way Google itself came to being.
- stretchwithme 13y agoIf such incentives are already in place, Google risks nothing by drawing attention to them. Either way potential inventors go, Google may make this happen sooner.
- krushin 13y agoI know this would be worth quite alot... but given google is sponsoring this. What kind of application could this have, or better yet if we get one that is super small/meets the qualification. What kind of potential does it have?
- drakaal 13y agoPower has to be stored as DC. If google wants to "own the grid" and we know they do. Then power will need to be efficiently converted from DC to AC. If you do this at the outlet, then LED's and other DC favoring electronics could be powered by wires that are DC, and AC would only be used when necessary. Think of all the devices you have with a power brick to take AC to DC. All of those are losing electrons along the way... (most power supplies are less than 75% efficient).
- nsrango 13y agoAdditionally AC transmission is inefficient compared to DC transmission; the skin effect[1] really kills you [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect
- abstrakraft 13y agoThe efficiency gained by stepping up AC to higher voltage (and correspondingly lower current) is far greater than that lost to skin effect. Since there is no way to efficiently step up DC (modern DC-DC converters are still horribly lossy), AC transmission ends up being more efficient, by a long shot.
- eigenvector 13y agoThere are scenarios where HVDC can be more suitable than AC, in particular, very long distance links (e.g. to a remote hydraulic station). All of the substation equipment is much more expensive in HVDC but the benefit of eliminating line reactance can outweigh this if you're doing 1000+ km without any interconnections. Also, interconnection between neighbouring AC grids is an important HVDC application since we don't have to worry about transient stability. Neither AC or DC are superior. Different technologies for different applications.
- beambot 13y agoThere was a HN article about "Dart" (and their Kickstarter) about a month ago. They're building vastly-smaller switching power converters in the VHF frequencies (upwards of 300MHz). I'm not sure about the validity of their claims, though I believe the tech originated at MIT. This could be one compelling route? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593909
- xxgreg 13y agoVery cool. However inverters are DC->AC. I think the correct term for AC->DC converter like Dart is a "rectifier".
- pbsurf 13y agoThe Dart and nearly all other wall-plug AC to DC converters use a rectify-invert-rectify method. They first rectify the 50/60Hz mains AC to DC, then convert it back to AC at much higher frequencies in the kHz - MHz range, or in the case of the Dart, hundreds of MHz, and finally rectify it again to produce the final DC output. For a given amount of power output, at higher frequency less energy has to be stored in the circuit per cycle (i.e. stored in reactive elements like capacitors), which enables more compact components to be used.
- hackcasual 13y agoIt's not AC because the flow of current doesn't reverse direction. It's pulsed on/off. The last stage isn't rectification, it's an LC circuit to smooth out the resulting voltage. The reason higher frequency switching is for smaller value capacitors and inductors.
- davepage 13y agoIf we're talking off-line power supplies, it most definitely _is_ AC for the simple reason non-ideal transformers will pass no DC. And, further, inductors and capacitors (LC) are all merely losses to DC signals. These components only have a meaningful function for AC waveforms (even though, in the case of a buck converter, a DC signal is superimposed).
- nanidin 13y agoIt's slightly pathetic that when viewing the website with Google's own browser, the font in the "SOMETIMES THE BIGGEST..." block is rendered incorrectly with stray pixels on top of the S's, O's, and G's. I'm assuming it's not intentional since zooming in causes the artifacts to disappear, but they come back when zoomed back out to 100%.
- alanchais 13y agoew, you use windows? Nice downvote idiot. The problem happens on all browsers in windows. So pathetically dumb
- User9821 13y agoChrome doesn't render Google web fonts well, it's been that way for as long as I remember. It's a known issue, and it's been reported countless times. You would expect this to be high priority, since reading text in the most important aspect of the internet. For whatever reason, Google doesn't seem to care, and they have no problem using these poorly rendered fonts all over the place.
- smaddock 13y agoThis is slightly incorrect as the problem only affects Google Chrome on Windows. Also, the Chrome team is actively working on this problem as seen in in its issue report [1]. The progress can be seen by launching Chrome Canary with the --enable-direct-write flag. chromestatus.com indicates that its scheduled to be released in M36. [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
- User9821 13y agoChrome for Windows is one of the most common setups for browsing the internet, so this isn't an edge case situation. That post originated in 2009, over 4.5 years ago. It's good to hear it might be finally addressed, but I wouldn't say they've been actively working on it, when all the other popular browsers had this sorted years ago.
- Tycho 13y agoWhy don't companies do this more often? Write down a list of stuff they need/would-like for their projects but aren't yet actively devoting resources to, and then offer prizes to anyone who comes up with the goods. I know that crowd-source design contests have been common (and controversial) but R&D I don't hear about so much.
- TwoBit 13y agoBecause usually what the companies are willing to pay is much too low for the actual effort involved.
- Tycho 13y agoThat would explain a lack of participation, but this seems more like a lack of offers. It doesn't cost the company anything to put up a reward.
- mentat 13y agoIt would cost them the legal due diligence and setup which could be significant for complicated requests and/or large companies.
- kretor 13y agoIn the future, other companies/orgs may add to one company's prize pot therefore make it a sufficient offer. Often times, people try to win the prize, knowing they'll on average make a loss, but doing it out of fun. See e.g. Google Lunar X Prize.
- lifeformed 13y agoBut the cool thing is that the companies will attract all the non-standard R&D people: smart kids, people in between jobs, university students, etc. Smart people with extra time on their hands, who would love for a tangible challenge to work on with real deadlines. But of course, it's also not really reasonable to devote so much time to something that they aren't guaranteed to win. Maybe there could be something in between? You show the company an early prototype or some sort of promising direction, and then they pay you a stipend to continue working on it. The prize money is then distributed among the most promising results, instead of just one.
- sehugg 13y agoThis was mentioned in the White House's FACT SHEET [1] on solar initiatives, fwiw. Certainly the inverter is an expensive hunk of metal, but soft costs like installation and permiting dominate the average residential PV installation. And if it were easy to make a more efficient inverter, wouldn't Xantrex have made one by now? Kinda confused. Oh well. Guess we'll find out more later. EDIT: Maybe they're talking about microinverters. I'd still like to see the spreadsheet describing the economics though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_micro-inverter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_micro-inverter https://completesolar.com/micro-inverters-vs-string-inverters https://completesolar.com/micro-inverters-vs-string-inverter... [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/09/fact-sheet-president-obama-announces-commitments-and-executive-actions-a http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/09/fact-s...
- akiselev 13y agoIn order to achieve parity with coal, utility solar installations (let alone residential) needs a lot of cost reductions across the board and will likely need significant infrastructure upgrades (like Germany's) [1]. Better inverters (cheaper, smaller, longer life time) would help keep driving costs down on large scale PV installations while also giving us a lot more breathing room when upgrading our energy infrastructure to deal with these drastically different power sources. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/german-parliament-oks-bold-hvdc-grid-upgrade http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/...
- Brakenshire 13y agoSoft costs dominate residential installations, but not utility or commercial installations, and it's only a matter of time until they fall away significantly (especially in the US, where the market doesn't seem to have shaken them out yet). Ultimately, you want solar to be significantly cheaper than the alternatives, and in order to do that, you have to drive down all aspects of the cost. I agree, though, that it seems odd for all the existing interter manufacturers not to put the money in themselves, if there is an opportunity.
- rrmm 13y agoAhh, thanks, that makes so much more sense! It seems that 5kW inverters have efficiencies around 97% which is pretty good. I wonder if they could print the micro-inverters as part of the panel manufacture and then just add the caps and inductors they need during packaging. This might also be a good opportunity to add features like distributed power generation, so that for remote locations, a power grid could be setup with residential panels, but no central power station.
- restlessdesign 13y agoIf Google is willing to pay $1M for this, I suspect that such a design is worth significantly more.