This sort of thing is already being done with many commercial devices. See www.powercast.com for one of the companies.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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I think you might have meant powercastco.com
powercast.com just hangs for me and never completes the request.
Yes thank you! Edited my comment to correct it.
Isn't that one of Nikola Tesla's inventions? Free electricity through the air?
Nah, that was just blasting a microwave beam at a collector. It would work and be meh on efficiency, but also bake everything between the two points...neat innovative theory, bad idea. Tesla was a smart dude, but his bad ideas were left ignored for a reason.
That's not right... He was trying to achieve wireless power through Earth resonance. Which AFAIK is pretty much now completely debunked as never going to work ... but it tracks with Tesla's world view.
It's kind of crazy how much you can build without a complete understanding... There's probably stuff we think we understand now that we really don't and other stuff left to discover.
I was thinking his wireless transmission, not harvesting... yeah, that is pretty out there.
No doubt there is plenty to discover, but there is a lot of B.S. that can be discarded, but people cling to it.
He also wanted to use the resonance for transmission AFAIK. He didn't really buy into the radio waves from a scientific standpoint (which to be fair to him ... everything was more theoretical back then; if he was in the modern era, he'd have better information to use).
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No, this is transforming focused radio waves into DC voltage using a transceiver, Rather than Tesla's ambient electricity harvested from the atmosphere.
In no way is this a discovery.
This is what crystal diode radios are from the '40s.
Some guy built one in Japan, it's basically just a thousand transceivers in a box hooked up to a USB port harvesting radius signals.
Here's a guy using them to make light:
It's super cool, but not a discovery.
A friend of mine was working on a car chassis and that thing suddenly started to receive radio. You could faintly hear it coming from the chassis and not from somewhere else. We thought we were going crazy. Touching the chassis made it go away.
Haha, that's so cool.
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I remember making a crystal diode radio with my dad as a kid. You can still buy kits for those.
From Radio Shack?!
This would be neat for a bunch of passive IoT buttons. No need for a piezo to generate power, good for a couple presses at a time, just simple stuff like that.
You're right, that would be the preferred application atm.
Charge up a capacitor and allow a single button press to send a radio signal. Or maybe have enough power to send a WiFi signal.
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Once its implementation is feasible and it can extract the waste energy efficiently, this innovation will enable new types of devices and uses that will be critical for commercial, scientific, medical and personal.
Sounds like it's still more theoretical than realized, at this point. Still, I can't help thinking this would be really cool for something like a watch or hearing aids.
It's realized, just not scaled.
I was a little careless with how I phrased that. They said in the article they've done it, but it's not "realized" in the sense that it's not to a level of practicality that they'd want it to be. It can currently harvest signals to -20dBm, but they think they can get that to -62dBm for greater efficiency.
The main hurdle, according to them, is there's no schottky diode that fits their needs, and they'll have to engineer a new variant (at the nano scale...?). So, still a theoretical possibility on a more practical level, but this is hopeful news nonetheless.
I agree, it's still very hopeful mews that this type of research into this is being conducted at all, I'm still looking forward to transceivers being built into cell phone batteries and slowly trickle charging constantly.
It will be used for ads...as usual...
Still, I can’t help thinking this would be really cool for something like a watch
Watches have been solved. You put a solar panel in the watch face. No need for anything more.
Smart watches use too much energy to do any remote powering with at all, short of qi charging/other near-touching power distribution.
I would find this super cool if it wasnt for the fact that all of the radio frequencies are owned by the military and corporations. Outdoor IoT could be amazing, but it is kind of dead because you cant actually connect it to the internet without laying down cable or using 4G which is horrible for low power applications.
This is the same take as people thinking wind energy steals wind, or solar energy reduces the sun's efficacy.
Technically, a properly tuned receiver that's using the signal for power can create radio "shadows" behind the device. People have also been caught with giant coils in their attic siphoning power from nearby radio stations and high voltage power lines, because they can detect the power draw.
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You are confusing what i am talking about. See my other response.
Wind energy does.
It's just that we can't extract sufficient energy from it to have any meaningful impact.
Exactly my analogy.
I don't know what kind of idea you are getting. Radio and wi-ifi are waves. The wave is what can be used, you don't care who generated it. To say it somehow the wave is in the air and you just take advantage of it being there to convert it to energy. Doesn't matter what the wave could have been read as. In general a radio station is not going to stop working for a whole region just to stop you from using it.
Maybe i left out too much context.
Im not talking about the research itself, but about how it could be utilized.
Their idea (having small devices that can be powered by nothing but stray radiowaves) apparently works and is great by itself.
However its usefullness is limited if you cant somehow connect those devices with the rest of the world. Thats the issue im complaining about.
Huh?
What are you asking for here? Some sort of worldwide free ISP?
There are already lots of concepts for low power wireless communication for example LoRaWAN The issue is not the ISP its the technology used to establish a connection between devices. We need hardware that can run with the low power requirements that come with this research.
That's not any sort of legal issue stopping you, that's physics. If you're trying to create say, some sort of mesh network, and the device is using all of the signal's power just to run itself, there's no power left to retransmit. You don't get something from nothing. We're talking microamps and smaller with these devices.
If you've ever used a crystal radio, you can get an idea for how weakly powered stuff like this is.
Edit: look up the channel "EEVBlog" on YouTube, dude has a dozen videos on various such devices and goes into the actual math and viability of each.
There are tons of small devices that don't have to be connected to be useful. Lots of personal items or small sensors.
Anything that can be powered by this research, can also be powered by a button sized battery for weeks if not not longer. I thinks its more intended for very off grid stuff but maybe im just too uncreative.
I just want it for my TV remote if the form factor is small enough
Good news, that was invented in 1956: https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-remote-control-button-of-the-month
The dawn of the Matrix is almost here chunmers!
No radio expert here, but would'nt this at some point interfere with the transmissions if deployed at a large scale?
Definitely not new. This is how RFID tags work. They harvest energy from the transmitter to power the circuitry in the tag to send back a response.
And low-power really means low powered... Like... milliamps. If you fed an RFID chip directly, you'd need to supply about 1 mW depending on the specific chip... 1 milliwatt...
In order to feed that chip with a transmitter you feed up to 2W. So up to 99.95% losses... It's NOT economical for any other device that isn't super low power.
Hell Qi charging is just as bad. Qi2, newest and greatest... Which you basically have the devices touching only get up to 80% at absolute best efficiency numbers. Every mm you add, drops that number significantly.
None of this is going to enable "battery free" for basically anything that any consumer would care to be battery free. And honestly I wish we wouldn't pump the airwaves with all sorts of garbage just because it enabled the most minimal amount of "convenience" for things that never needed to be convenient to begin with.
Not new indeed. Kinda reminds me of old Nextel phones that you would put a little LED on the antenna and it would blink from the EMI when sending and receiving data.
Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna
What they've done here is use the very old existing rectenna technology and new types of nanoscale rectenna arrays to capture very low energy radio waves without an external antenna. We're taking -20 dBm or 10 μW.
Dang that's actually a super interesting concept. Thanks for the wikipedia link!
Tale as old as time. And guess what will happen? Wifi signal strength will go down.
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it's called an antenna. That's its job.
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