Time Lord  Posts: 10005 Joined: 13 Feb 2008     | |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 432 Joined: 14 Nov 2008     | Magnets? Touching my electronics? Does...not...compute!! --- Seriously though, pretty neat idea, actually, it's a grand idea! |
Copy Clerk Posts: 125 Joined: 21 Jan 2008    | Wait... you can send power wirelessly and have it be safer, less expensive and actually use _less_ power than a normal cable? Crazy stuff, intuition and experience both point to wires being better than wireless on every front save portability. I guess if the energy's being transferred by a magnetic field, it won't face any resistance (unlike electricity in a wire) |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1753 Joined: 22 Oct 2008    | And would the mat be plugged into a standard power socket? |
Video Producer  Posts: 382 Joined: 21 Jul 2008     |
Magnetic induction power supplies have been around for a long time. It's basically an air core transformer with one of the coils being removable. Think along the lines of an electric toothbrush charger. In reality, the fact that it offers comparable wattage to a direct outlet is meaningless due to the fact that any time energy travels through air it loses some amount of energy. This is at best a more efficient model of what's already out there, probably incorporating some new alloy to replace a ferrite core in the base. I'm not saying this isn't a neat little gadget, incorporating multiple charge coils and RFID technology, but it's far from changing the way we use electronics forever. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 4169 Joined: 6 Sep 2008    | This gave me a technostiffy.
Nicholai Tesla would disagree :D |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 3415 Joined: 28 Jun 2008 |
Beat me too it. I was getting all worked up, too, with my physics book in front of me. Caught me when I was revising. This is going to be one of those quasi-useful items that's going to become household tech, unless it costs more than £15. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 4169 Joined: 6 Sep 2008 |
But isn't it THOSE items that drive innovation and technoligy? Remember Betamax vs VHS, etc etc... |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 3415 Joined: 28 Jun 2008 |
Nope, but I do remember VHS Vs. DVD. That wasn't really a contest; but, hey! I have my youth! Nope, the ones that drive the industry are the ones that very few people buy because they're so damn expensive. See expensive graphics cards. Seriously, click this. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 4169 Joined: 6 Sep 2008 |
High end super expensive peripherals don't drive innovation, they ride it's wave. The Ford Model T vs the Ferrari- the Ferrari doesn't push transportation technoligy forward, it refines it with fancy shenanigans and luxury. Meanwhile the Model T was a shitbox on leather wheels that was handcranked, but it revolutionized transportation in the United States and even the world. Often times, innovation is seen as a sub par product that won't catch on- but it does something new, does it cheaply, does it reliably, so people buy it. And with the wave of green awareness sweeping the US and the world (except China), do you really think an energy neutral magnetic charger won't catch on? Unless this thing is expensive, I predict it'll at least become the next fad for handheld owners. Also, 18,000 Dollars? Goddamn son. Especially considering most PC's can't even run that thing... Why not just sell a supercomputer nVidia? I hear colleges are daisy chaining PS3's, you can do the same thing! |
On the Record  Posts: 5490 Joined: 13 Aug 2008   | You know, I heard about something like this a while back that used an electromagnetic coil to generate fields of electricity that could charge batteries and the like fairly quickly just by standing in them, at no harm to the person. Unfortunately, the coil required to generate a field the size of a small house was about the size of a refrigerator, and quite expensive, so it's still in a prototype phase. |
Video Producer Posts: 382 Joined: 21 Jul 2008 |
Innovation is found where necessity meets invention. Comparing a Ferrari to a Model T is an unnecessary exaggeration, because what Ferrari did for the automobile has had a trickle-down effect. The same goes for electronics; you can't argue that the advent of the home PC made a bigger impact on computing than the silicon transistor, since they are both pushing forward in the same direction and constantly being updated. 98% efficient inductive charging is still 2% less green than just using a plug, and even less green when you consider the amount of energy required to make such a complex device to begin with. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1615 Joined: 16 Jan 2008   |
Wait, so IS it more green? Or less green? |
Time Lord Posts: 10005 Joined: 13 Feb 2008 |
Difficult to say. I agree with Captain on this, but charging multiple appliances at once may tip the balance. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2940 Joined: 22 Jun 2008   | What kind of mad genii do they have working in the science vessels, anyway? Mixing magnets with my electronics... In my day *grumbles* |
Video Producer Posts: 382 Joined: 21 Jul 2008 |
True. Being able to charge multiple appliances will greatly improve the green-ness, but there are some big hurdles left to jump over. While the device is probably more efficient than using multiple wall-warts for low current charging, it likely has multiple inductors to handle charging multiple devices simultaneously. I worry that the 98% efficiency quoted on these devices' websites is when it's only charging one. Secondly, it's not like you can just set a AA NiCd / NiMH / LiPO battery on top of the thing and expect it to recharge. You still need a second coil and some control circuitry in the device to be charged. Implementing the cordless charging circuit into lots of devices will have the biggest impact, and simultaneously have the biggest drawback in the high probability of proprietary circuits. I wouldn't expect a Microsoft charger to work with a Sony device any time in the near future. Don't be fooled - I'm optimistic about the potential this technology has, but it's like saying world peace would be great if given a chance. If they went open source with this, it could very well be the Model T of the electronics world, while simultaneously being the equivalent of a civil rights movement in the robotics community. The fact that this was at CES suggests otherwise, which is unfortunate. |
PROBATION  Posts: 3328 Joined: 23 Oct 2007  |
http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html Go nuts. OK, you'll only be able to do single-precision calculations, but hell, that's one powerful machine. User was put on probation for: Do you think you're sexually attractive?. (3 days) |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2651 Joined: 20 Jul 2008     | Magnets eh? I fear for the safety of the electronics memory. |
Infamous Scribbler  Posts: 597 Joined: 13 Dec 2008     | Hmm. I wouldn't have thought that magnets and electronics would mix well. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 492 Joined: 12 Dec 2007   |
No. In another world maybe, a perfect world perhaps, but not here. Here, innovation is found, where speculation meets profit. Think about it, who are the entities that make innovations possible? Corporations. What is a corporation? Profit maximizing machine, without care for anything else. What is innovation? A new technology to solve a certain problem. You can do the math from here. If there is no profit in solving a problem, it won't be solved. This is our world today. We have the technology to solve world hunger, to house everyone on the planet and make the bare necessities of survival and comfortable living available to every living thing on Earth. For free. But instead of doing that, the US alone spends more than $500,000,000,000 on "defense" a year. And only roughly 4 billion on cancer research. This is only one example. Whats wrong with that picture? As for this new invention, it's awesome. Nikola Tesla invented the technology way back, when electricity was relatively new. He made the wireless transportation of electricity possible. In one experiment, he made a whole field of lightbulbs light up. Literally a field, the bulbs were just plucked into the ground, no wires, nothing. This is essentially the same technology, only improved. Never heard of Nikola Tesla? There is a reason. He was a victim of the corporate interest. He made wireless power possible, but the electric corporation (and the largest creditor J. P. Morgan) wasn't that enthusiastic, because there is no profit in the technology. You can't put a meter on air, and what you can't measure, you can't tax, ergo: no profit. So they simply made Tesla vanish, along with his inventions. Who got all the credit? Thomas Edison, who outright stole many of Tesla's inventions and published them as his own. Edison made a deal with J. P. Morgan, so he became the celebrity. Interesting, huh? |
Video Producer Posts: 382 Joined: 21 Jul 2008 | I think the demonstration you are referring to occurred much later: Tesla did a lot for us, and I consider him a pioneer for open source technology. There's no need to go into excessive detail about the man, and it's no secret that he was screwed over by the corporate world. However, it didn't stop him from upholding his principles, including selebacy in the name of science. The world isn't perfect, but often you'll find the dreamers aren't the cause for such imperfection. |
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Magnets Are Now Re-Volting
Fancy ditching all those fiddly wires that keep tripping you up? Get yourself a magnetic Powermat or get eCoupled.
The Powermat, revealed at CES, is an Israeli invention that uses magnetic induction to recharge batteries, without removing them from the device itself. The system is already clever enough to identify RFID tags and deliver power based on the power needs of the device, even recharging up to four devices at once, with differing needs.
"It can charge a 100-watt gadget side by side with an iPod Nano that is very low power," said Ron Ferber, president of Powermat. "It knows what's on the mat."
Also at CES was the eCoupled system, developed by Fulton Innovation, which detects the power need by the induction coil already within the device, and then recharges it in a similar way.
Both devices won't be available to the general public until late 2009, but the system itself is safer and less expensive than normal wall-based cables. Obviously, you can't power devices like monitors or items with a hard-disk, due to the magnets inside - that would be bad, - but the inventions are still in their infancy. As it stands, you can run a desklamp or fan purely by sitting them on the mat.
The systems are also green (as the power use is massively decreased), take a similar time to recharge as normal wall-based sockets and can't shock you (as the mat needs to recognize the RFID/coil before it will provide power).
And the one thing that might really excite all you Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 players is the system could still work after the National Power Grid is taken out by hordes of Infected Mutants, so you'll still be able to use your mobile after The Fall.
Source: BBC
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