cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18426215
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.
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.
There are tons of small devices that don’t have to be connected to be useful. Lots of personal items or small sensors.
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.
Wind energy does.
It’s just that we can’t extract sufficient energy from it to have any meaningful impact.
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.
Without tracking: https://youtu.be/_pm2tLN6KOQ
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.
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.
This sort of thing is already being done with many commercial devices. See www.powercastco.com for one of the companies.
I think you might have meant powercastco.com
powercast.com just hangs for me and never completes the request.
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.
how much you can build without a complete understanding
We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.
My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.
Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.
So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.
And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?
The dawn of the Matrix is almost here chunmers!
