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RE: PowerCast : The end of electricy adapters?!
As said by others, harvesting energy out of RF signals is nothing new at all and is in fact already used in many devices (mostly by hobbyists and HAM radio people, etc) for years and years... even early 90's maybe.
Why they posted this news now seems a bit strange to me... Unless someone out there took the original news it a bit wrong and the original news was that this old technology is just being "rediscovered" and applied in "modern" devices like cell phones.
It is nothing new at all and I even remember my late grandfather (HAM radio hobbyist) making stuff with it...
It is just that this particular company has made something with this decade old technology (which many people seem to have forgotten or even didn't know/knew anymore it existed) to power new and modern devices like cell phones and mp3 players.
IMHO, news is seriously overrated, especially with "brand new technology" headlines. They didn't invented the wheel or the holy grale of power consumption. It is not more 'news' than Bridgestone making another revolutionary tire which displaces even more water than before; they too didn't invented the wheel...
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However, same kind of prinicple can be used with infrared waves which would not have the disadvantage of suffering from interference, like this low RF signal.
It also has the advantage that no external signal needs to be made first. The RF signal still needs to come from somewhere, something with power, while the IR waves just comes from the sun (exactly like solar power panels).
The IR technology consists of extremely small miniature "solar panels" (if you will call it like that) which on its own only produce a small fraction of electricity, but together will produce even more electricity than a single solar panel cell and it would be way smaller in scale.
Another advantage of the IR couterpart is that it can send not-needed energy to other appliances as each device would be equiped with a reciever and sender.
This IR technology is much more promissing than the RF technology. The only downside, at the moment, because this is brand new (unlike this RF stuff), is that it is way more expensive.
The IR counterpart of this has been made possible only now because the technology to make extremely small cells which harvest energy out of IR signals without the need of other energy (like solar cells we all know) is just new and is based (IIRC, this might be not correct) on some molecular stuff going on (hence the possible extremely small size of the "panels").
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So, although this RF wireless transfer of energy might solve the problem of cluttering of wires and stuff. It does not solve the enegry problem, since the RF signal still need to come from a special source (a normal radio signal isn't powerfull enough, the stuff they talk about with RF wireless transfer of energy requires very low RF waves).
The IR wireless transfer is actually a beafed up solar panel on stereoids if you will, no need for any special external energy source (except a small amount of light, eg: from the sun). And because it is IR, it is also easy to transfer the signal to other IR panels, which on their turn simply harvest it... Thus making it possible for devices to "share and distribute" energy as they need it.
Once that IR technology is put in practice I would call that news, as it would actually solve a lot of energy problems... But not this RF gizmo thing...
IMHO
This post was edited on 01-12-2007 at 04:51 AM by CookieRevised.
.-= A 'frrrrrrrituurrr' for Wacky =-. | 
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