5 ms·

iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag: Funding Suspended

56 points by MarlonPro 12y ago

mehdim 12y ago
why suspended?
- daeken 12y ago
  According to comments, the project is a big bag o' fraud. Some good information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating/comments?cursor=7108461#comment-7108460 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-wo...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- uptown 12y ago
  There's a lot of skepticism whether their product is in-any-way feasible. The concern is that they're raising money without a technically-viable product.
  - daeken 12y ago
    Seems there's a bit more to it than just that. They claimed that they had pending patents when they don't (or at least, the patent numbers they gave are bunk), their demo video had bluetooth turned off, and some other nasty things. It seems to me that if they do have a legitimate product, they sure picked a bad way to show that.
    - leonardzen 12y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised to find out this is something that came from 4chan.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
therobot24 12y ago
any news as to why it was suspended? I checked the updates and didn't see anything
- philmcc 12y ago
  This is a message one of the backers received (according to the comments): Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety
  - hgsigala 12y ago
    I received the same message but with $16
- makomk 12y ago
  There was a bunch of news articles about the fact their product is almost certainly being impossible, and Kickstarter presumably decided they didn't want the bad press. (Merely violating the laws of physics isn't enough for them to take action.)
mentos 12y ago
pulled from the comments: Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety Rules Community Guidelines Terms of Use
columbo 12y ago
Couldn't you do this with RFID tags and a scanner on your phone? I don't know if this is legitimate or not, but something like this: http://agbeat.com/tech-news/rfid-enabled-devices-keep-tabs-on-your-professional-belongings/ http://agbeat.com/tech-news/rfid-enabled-devices-keep-tabs-o...
- daeken 12y ago
  I'm not sure why they say these are RFID-enabled; all the tags they show are BTLE. The difference being that BTLE devices are active transmitters (they have a battery), and RFID tags are passive, having their energy provided via radio waves or magnetic coupling. The problem with RFID is that past a few feet, you need a lot of energy to power them (it falls off with the inverse-square law), which your phone just won't (and shouldn't) put out. So RFID is dead in the water for this sort of thing, but BTLE solutions abound and are quite cheap, despite that they need to have a battery.
  - TTPrograms 12y ago
    IIRC RFID actually falls off with R^4 because the power gets transmitted to the RFID tag and then it's reduced by the same factor again when it transmits back.
    - daeken 12y ago
      The power is obviously lost on the way back, but this doesn't actually factor into the distance you can read from, practically speaking. If you can get power to the device, you can use a super high-gain antenna to receive its transmission. Same thing goes with NFC chips; the one I have implanted can only be powered feasibly from about 10 inches away (physically impossible beyond about half a meter, due to flesh and the fact that it's magnetic coupling), but if something else powers it, you can read it from an exceptionally large distance.
      - TTPrograms 12y ago
        Well, yeah, by the same logic you could could power it with a high gain antenna as well and boost your distance. The falloff is still 1/R^4 without a third power source, you've just multiplied it by a constant.
smackfu 12y ago
Interesting. I bought some of the Tiles (link below), and they are basically the same thing, except they have a 1-year battery and are a bit thicker. They work fine. http://www.thetileapp.com/ http://www.thetileapp.com/
peterwwillis 12y ago
Why wouldn't people just use RFID tags? They're cheap and batteryless. You could slip one in your phone's battery cover to locate it (or tape it on) and the locator could be a 'dumb' brick of plastic and a tiny circuit with a 9V battery that's mated to the tags.
- giarc 12y ago
  RFID doesn't work at large ranges. You would basically have to be holding the RFID reader with 10cm of the object you are trying to find to actually get a signal.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    If you could put a central emitter coil in your house somewhere, how strong would the field need to be to hit every part of the house? Hmm...
- bri3d 12y ago
  Passive RFID tags can't beep, so the locator would need to either use multiple antennas and fun algorithms (indoor location is pretty hard, especially if your device is small and the antennas are close together) or a highly directional antenna and user antenna-waving input. The nice part about beeping locating tags (for those without hearing disabilities, of course) is that rather than using complex RF approaches to location, they just make noise and let the human do something they're already good at: locate a sound.
  - peterwwillis 12y ago
    The locater thingy you would carry in your hand could beep faster when it gets close to a tag.
mortenjorck 12y ago
If this isn't the smoking gun, it's at least the smoke: Unlike other locating tags, there is no battery in the iFind tag. It recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank. This is the sort of language that never describes an actual technological breakthrough. It's a combination of a description that's too pat, too abstracted, with a feat that is too impressive to go without at least some reference to the actual processes that make it work.
- vlunkr 12y ago
  Exactly, if they really created this battery-less technology they could probably do things much more impressive than iFind
  - pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
    how do you think RFID tags work?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Not really. There's nothing fundamentally interesting or new here. It's the same principle as a crystal radio, but somewhat more complex since they're claiming to store power over time and then use it in bursts. The real problem here is simply that their claimed power budget can't be covered by the RF emissions they say that it uses. But the idea is reasonably sound even if their implementation may not be.
  - vsviridov 12y ago
    http://hackaday.com/2013/01/15/ltc3105-and-ltc3109-energy-harvesting-chips/ http://hackaday.com/2013/01/15/ltc3105-and-ltc3109-energy-ha... There are chips that allow you to gather and store miniscule amounts of electricity from surrounding RF radiation. Bluetooth LE is also designed to be a very low-power devices, so it is within the realm of possibility for this particular project.
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      So the LTC3105 [1] looks to be able to supply 0.060 amps at 4 volts. Bluetooth LE [2] seems to use about 0.015 amps at peak (voltage not listed). If I am reading this correctly, it is possible. The question is: what actually runs the circuit connected to the Bluetooth transceiver? [1] http://gnodevel.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628 http://gnodevel.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Technical_details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Technical_...
publicfig 12y ago
To future readers, the title used to say "SUSPENDED: iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag". Unfortunately, the title was changed, removing all of the context of its posting. Just another reason the automated title changers need to be reëvaluated.
- mortenjorck 12y ago
  I don't understand why HN still has a field for manually entering titles if the system is capable of scraping it from the linked site, and does it automatically within a few minutes of posting.
  - lazerwalker 12y ago
    Because sometimes being able to manually add in editorializing can be valuable. In this specific example, the added "SUSPENDED" that was removed gave context about why the link was interesting.
  - nicksergeant 12y ago
    There are actual human beings on HN who are tasked with changing submission titles.
- dang 12y ago
  We put "Funding Suspended" back. "Funding Suspended" is in fact a subtitle of the OP at present, so there's no problem having it in the HN title. But the submitted title should not have said "SUSPENDED:" in all-caps. We try to keep the HN front page free of clamor.
joosters 12y ago
Related articles about the dubious nature of this kickstarter (grabbed from a comment on the KS project page): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185038-ifind-worlds-first-battery-free-bluetooth-location-tag-raises-500000-despite-all-the-hallmarks-of-being-a-giant-scam http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185038-ifind-worlds-first... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/ifind_kickstarter/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/ifind_kickstarter/ http://bgr.com/2014/06/24/kickstarter-wetag-ifind-scam/ http://bgr.com/2014/06/24/kickstarter-wetag-ifind-scam/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- 51Cards 12y ago
  One more... http://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free-bluetooth-item-locating-tags-exist/ http://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free...
jkestner 12y ago
The definitive engineering breakdown: http://drop-kicker.com/2014/06/ifind-rf-energy-harvesting-bluetooth-beacon/ http://drop-kicker.com/2014/06/ifind-rf-energy-harvesting-bl... (Drop-Kicker is amazing.)

56 points by MarlonPro 12y ago

mehdim 12y ago

why suspended?

daeken 12y ago
According to comments, the project is a big bag o' fraud. Some good information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating/comments?cursor=7108461#comment-7108460 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-wo...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
uptown 12y ago
There's a lot of skepticism whether their product is in-any-way feasible. The concern is that they're raising money without a technically-viable product.
- daeken 12y ago
  Seems there's a bit more to it than just that. They claimed that they had pending patents when they don't (or at least, the patent numbers they gave are bunk), their demo video had bluetooth turned off, and some other nasty things. It seems to me that if they do have a legitimate product, they sure picked a bad way to show that.
  - leonardzen 12y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised to find out this is something that came from 4chan.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

therobot24 12y ago

any news as to why it was suspended? I checked the updates and didn't see anything

philmcc 12y ago
This is a message one of the backers received (according to the comments): Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety
- hgsigala 12y ago
  I received the same message but with $16
makomk 12y ago
There was a bunch of news articles about the fact their product is almost certainly being impossible, and Kickstarter presumably decided they didn't want the bad press. (Merely violating the laws of physics isn't enough for them to take action.)

mentos 12y ago

pulled from the comments: Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety Rules Community Guidelines Terms of Use

columbo 12y ago

Couldn't you do this with RFID tags and a scanner on your phone? I don't know if this is legitimate or not, but something like this: http://agbeat.com/tech-news/rfid-enabled-devices-keep-tabs-on-your-professional-belongings/ http://agbeat.com/tech-news/rfid-enabled-devices-keep-tabs-o...

daeken 12y ago
I'm not sure why they say these are RFID-enabled; all the tags they show are BTLE. The difference being that BTLE devices are active transmitters (they have a battery), and RFID tags are passive, having their energy provided via radio waves or magnetic coupling. The problem with RFID is that past a few feet, you need a lot of energy to power them (it falls off with the inverse-square law), which your phone just won't (and shouldn't) put out. So RFID is dead in the water for this sort of thing, but BTLE solutions abound and are quite cheap, despite that they need to have a battery.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  IIRC RFID actually falls off with R^4 because the power gets transmitted to the RFID tag and then it's reduced by the same factor again when it transmits back.
  - daeken 12y ago
    The power is obviously lost on the way back, but this doesn't actually factor into the distance you can read from, practically speaking. If you can get power to the device, you can use a super high-gain antenna to receive its transmission. Same thing goes with NFC chips; the one I have implanted can only be powered feasibly from about 10 inches away (physically impossible beyond about half a meter, due to flesh and the fact that it's magnetic coupling), but if something else powers it, you can read it from an exceptionally large distance.
    - TTPrograms 12y ago
      Well, yeah, by the same logic you could could power it with a high gain antenna as well and boost your distance. The falloff is still 1/R^4 without a third power source, you've just multiplied it by a constant.

smackfu 12y ago

Interesting. I bought some of the Tiles (link below), and they are basically the same thing, except they have a 1-year battery and are a bit thicker. They work fine. http://www.thetileapp.com/ http://www.thetileapp.com/

peterwwillis 12y ago

Why wouldn't people just use RFID tags? They're cheap and batteryless. You could slip one in your phone's battery cover to locate it (or tape it on) and the locator could be a 'dumb' brick of plastic and a tiny circuit with a 9V battery that's mated to the tags.

giarc 12y ago
RFID doesn't work at large ranges. You would basically have to be holding the RFID reader with 10cm of the object you are trying to find to actually get a signal.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  If you could put a central emitter coil in your house somewhere, how strong would the field need to be to hit every part of the house? Hmm...
bri3d 12y ago
Passive RFID tags can't beep, so the locator would need to either use multiple antennas and fun algorithms (indoor location is pretty hard, especially if your device is small and the antennas are close together) or a highly directional antenna and user antenna-waving input. The nice part about beeping locating tags (for those without hearing disabilities, of course) is that rather than using complex RF approaches to location, they just make noise and let the human do something they're already good at: locate a sound.
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  The locater thingy you would carry in your hand could beep faster when it gets close to a tag.

mortenjorck 12y ago

If this isn't the smoking gun, it's at least the smoke: Unlike other locating tags, there is no battery in the iFind tag. It recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank. This is the sort of language that never describes an actual technological breakthrough. It's a combination of a description that's too pat, too abstracted, with a feat that is too impressive to go without at least some reference to the actual processes that make it work.

vlunkr 12y ago
Exactly, if they really created this battery-less technology they could probably do things much more impressive than iFind
- pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
  how do you think RFID tags work?
- mikeash 12y ago
  Not really. There's nothing fundamentally interesting or new here. It's the same principle as a crystal radio, but somewhat more complex since they're claiming to store power over time and then use it in bursts. The real problem here is simply that their claimed power budget can't be covered by the RF emissions they say that it uses. But the idea is reasonably sound even if their implementation may not be.
- vsviridov 12y ago
  http://hackaday.com/2013/01/15/ltc3105-and-ltc3109-energy-harvesting-chips/ http://hackaday.com/2013/01/15/ltc3105-and-ltc3109-energy-ha... There are chips that allow you to gather and store miniscule amounts of electricity from surrounding RF radiation. Bluetooth LE is also designed to be a very low-power devices, so it is within the realm of possibility for this particular project.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    So the LTC3105 [1] looks to be able to supply 0.060 amps at 4 volts. Bluetooth LE [2] seems to use about 0.015 amps at peak (voltage not listed). If I am reading this correctly, it is possible. The question is: what actually runs the circuit connected to the Bluetooth transceiver? [1] http://gnodevel.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628 http://gnodevel.ugent.be/crr.ugent.be/archives/1628 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Technical_details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Technical_...

publicfig 12y ago

To future readers, the title used to say "SUSPENDED: iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag". Unfortunately, the title was changed, removing all of the context of its posting. Just another reason the automated title changers need to be reëvaluated.

mortenjorck 12y ago
I don't understand why HN still has a field for manually entering titles if the system is capable of scraping it from the linked site, and does it automatically within a few minutes of posting.
- lazerwalker 12y ago
  Because sometimes being able to manually add in editorializing can be valuable. In this specific example, the added "SUSPENDED" that was removed gave context about why the link was interesting.
- nicksergeant 12y ago
  There are actual human beings on HN who are tasked with changing submission titles.
dang 12y ago
We put "Funding Suspended" back. "Funding Suspended" is in fact a subtitle of the OP at present, so there's no problem having it in the HN title. But the submitted title should not have said "SUSPENDED:" in all-caps. We try to keep the HN front page free of clamor.

joosters 12y ago

Related articles about the dubious nature of this kickstarter (grabbed from a comment on the KS project page): http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185038-ifind-worlds-first-battery-free-bluetooth-location-tag-raises-500000-despite-all-the-hallmarks-of-being-a-giant-scam http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185038-ifind-worlds-first... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/ifind_kickstarter/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/ifind_kickstarter/ http://bgr.com/2014/06/24/kickstarter-wetag-ifind-scam/ http://bgr.com/2014/06/24/kickstarter-wetag-ifind-scam/

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
51Cards 12y ago
One more... http://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free-bluetooth-item-locating-tags-exist/ http://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free...

jkestner 12y ago

The definitive engineering breakdown: http://drop-kicker.com/2014/06/ifind-rf-energy-harvesting-bluetooth-beacon/ http://drop-kicker.com/2014/06/ifind-rf-energy-harvesting-bl... (Drop-Kicker is amazing.)