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Charge iDevices over wifi !!!!

Discussion in 'General iOS discussions' started by Applerish10, Oct 19, 2011.

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Applerish10 Banned

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Imagine perpetual power to your cellphone, MP3 player, digital camera, pocket camcorder or other low-power portable. No more battery recharging, never again having to plug your iPhone, iPod, Flip or whatever into an AC jack. A new technology being developed by RCA, initially as an emergency power supply, may promise just that by sucking power from Wi-Fi signals and constantly recharging the device's battery.
You read that right. RCA has discovered a way to absorb power from increasingly ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals. This may prove to be the answer to all portable power issues, forever.
The first products will be AirPower chargers, which are planned to be available by the holidays. These little pods (about the size of a flip phone) soak up residual power from any available Wi-Fi signal automatically to recharge its internal battery. Once fully charged (around five to six hours of Wi-Fi exposure), you can then recharge any low-power device via a USB connection in the same amount of time AC connections currently take. You can also use your device while AirPower charges it.
You never plug in the AirPower. Just leave it around wherever there's Wi-Fi and it takes in power without you doing anything. If you carry it around, it'll automatically suck up power as you pass through or linger in a hotspot.
How is this even possible? An RCA exec explained to me that it has something to do with regurgitating and converting the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal. We'll do our best to get a more comprehensive explanation in the coming days.
Pricing has yet to be determined, but the technology isn't limited to a separate charger. RCA says the AirPower can be embedded into devices to constantly recharge their internal battery. The company didn't say if they were going to pursue embedded AirPower licensing but they just gotta, right?

SOURCE: Portable power breakthrough: RCA AirPower absorbs energy from Wi-Fi | DVICE
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/rca-supplies-po.php

Applerish10, Oct 19, 2011

#1
iBricked Well-Known Member

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What. It would produce heat and would lose energy from trying to suck it. Maybe possible but does this break any laws?

iBricked, Oct 19, 2011

#2
xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx Active Member

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cool

xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx, Oct 19, 2011

#3
xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx Active Member

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edit: over a year old, its not going to happen.

xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx, Oct 19, 2011

#4
xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx Active Member

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Gizmodo reported about a Gadget shown at CES 2010 that supposedly harvests energy from a wireless hotspot. The “RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester” consists of a small battery, a USB connector and some circuitry that is supposed to convert wireless signals into DC power to top up the battery. The gadget can then be used to recharge or power any device that can draw power from a USB port, such as a cell phone or iPod.

A claim was made in a Youtube video on the Gizmodo site that the gadget will charge a Blackberry mobile phone from 30% to fully charged in 90 minutes. That may well be true, if the internal battery of the gadget starts off fully charged and is big enough. The big question is, how much energy can this wireless harvester actually draw out of thin air to replenish its internal battery, if any?

The whole thing reminds me of the hoax of the Japanese “car that runs on water” demonstrated in June 2008 by now apparently defunct company Genepax Co. Ltd. (their website went offline the following year). That car turned out to have a set of lead-acid batteries that — fully charged — could have powered the car some distance even if the proprietary fuel cell announced by Genepax was completely dysfunctional. In any case, the quoted power output of the fuel cell of only 300W was completely inadequate to power a car, meaning the batteries (the real power source) would have had to be recharged from a wall socket before too long.

Likewise, the amount of power available from a WiFi hotspot is nowhere near enough to run a computer or mobile phone. Take my cheap Samsung mobile phone with a 880 mAh 3.7 V Li ion battery (a battery capacity of 3.2 Wh) that I normally need to charge every other day or so. 3.2 Wh over 48 h works out as about 67 mW, which is not that much. However, the maximum power at which a wireless access point may transmit under FCC regulations without needing a broadcast license is a mere 100 mW. Even if the “Hotspot Harvester” could convert 2/3 of the radio energy into usable DC power, it would have to suck up 100% of all energy radiated by the access point, which would have to broadcast at full blast all the time instead of just when there is traffic, just to keep my cell phone charged.

In reality, there is no way the harvester can grab 100% or 10% or even 1% of the energy from the hotspot, which radiates wireless signals in all directions. The gadget can only harvest the small fraction of the airwaves that cross its antenna, which is only a few centimetres by a few centimetres in size, while the hotspot may be metres or tens of metres away. The numbers simply don’t add up.

What that device is then is just a glorified spare battery that will need to be recharged by plugging it into a wall socket or the USB port of a mains-powered computer. The “energy harvesting” function can make no meaningful contribution to the battery charge – unless maybe you happen to put it inside a microwave oven and radiate it with 1000W of power (boys, don’t try this at home! ).

The sad thing is how many websites and blogs have given free publicity to these claims, without doing the math to check if they make any sense at all.

..

xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx, Oct 19, 2011

#5
iBricked Well-Known Member

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No credit to me for telling you?

iBricked, Oct 19, 2011

#6
Aiwa Banned

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No.

Aiwa, Oct 19, 2011

#7
xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx Active Member

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iBricked said: ↑

No credit to me for telling you?

haha okay then

xX-SicKsKiLZz-Xx, Oct 19, 2011

#8
Deny Member

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I sometimes ask myself how naive humanity really is. Wi-Fi cannot charge and never will. It transfers information. It just cannot do what you ask. xD

Deny, Oct 19, 2011

#9
Lux2GS Well-Known Member

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Oh jesus. Whoever wrote/invented/though of that for more than 5 seconds and actually believed this was possible, has an F in Physics.

Lux2GS, Oct 19, 2011

#10

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