UBeam Declassifies Secrets to Try to Prove Wireless Power Is Possible | Hacker News Reader

UBeam Declassifies Secrets to Try to Prove Wireless Power Is Possible

techcrunch.com

63 pointsprostoalex48 comments

The new numbers match what I said on YC the last time this came up.[1] Although uBeam's web site talks about megahertz ultrasound, as I pointed out, that won't work - air will absorb all the energy in less than a meter. They have to operate in the 40KHz - 100KHz range, where everybody else does air ultrasound and where the attenuation is moderate. Sure enough, they're now saying 45KHz to 75KHz.

As I pointed out last time, if you put together a 1 meter square array of off the shelf American Piezo ultrasonic transducers, about 4000 of them, you could get to their claimed 155dB level. But it would take about 2KW to drive the thing, comparable to a small clothes dryer. Their new figure is 3KW, a medium-sized clothes dryer.

They claim to be able to deliver 1.5W (not KW) to a device, for an efficiency of 0.05%. The rest of the 3KW will heat the air. The energy has to go someplace.

As I pointed out last time, this thing can potentially transmit some power, but it's an insanely inefficient way to do it. It can also double as a space heater and steerable ultrasonic welder.

I'll bet we'll see a demo of this at a trade show, with about a 2-3 meter range, a transmitting array about a foot square, and some mobile device with a special case as the target. The demo will work. The transmitter will draw about 300W, and deliver a few watts at the target end. It will have enough smarts to turn off if you put an obstacle in the beam. You could build that right now from off the shelf parts. As a deployed technology, it's unlikely to be useful.

Remember that guy who demoed power transmission over a few meters by ganging up enough WiFi transmitters to get some real power? Whatever happened to him?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10421628

With a 1M^2 array, would all 4,000 transducers need to be active simultaneously to achieve 155db? I ask because it seems part of their core IP is the beamforming technology, which could mean physically steering the transducers towards the receiver, or only activating those transducers which point directly at the receiver.

Yes, they'd all be active, and at the same frequency, but in different phases. Beam forming is done by adjusting the phase of each transmitting element so that all the elements are in phase relative to a surface aimed at the target. See [1]. Each transducer has a relatively wide output dispersion, but the entire array produces a much tighter beam. This is a standard technology for radio, radar, and sonar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

Is there any reason to use sound to transmit power rather than magnetic fields?

Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they can somehow overcome the focusing of sound problem and get it to work... what remains are other issues with this technology.

One thing that is not discussed enough when talking about uBeam are health effects of high-energy ultrasound. The kinds of energies that uBeam is talking about can destroy or seriously damage human hearing. [1]

I don't even know if there is any research out there on what effects high-energy ultrasound can have on animals and pets (many of whom have sensitive hearing; much more sensitive than humans).

In any case, uBeam has a lot of problems ahead and I don't think they have raised nearly enough money to meet all these challenges.

[1]: http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/crr_pdf/2001/crr01343.pdf

The TechCrunch article [1] referred to a study in pig tissue as but the article is paywalled. I'd love to take a look... but not so much that I'd pay $40 to do so.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041624X15...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/how-ubeam-works/

Here you go:

http://docdro.id/J8cWQCj

600 mW through 10 to 15 mm of tissue. That's a pretty hefty limitation. For one that's a short distance, second tissue will conduct ultrasound a lot better than air.

I don't see anything new here on top of what the skeptics have postulated.

In particular the 145-155db number does not look 100% safe for me. This is not going to burn your skin but you might end up hearing it anyway, feeling uncomfortable or who knows what. Various opinions about the safe level for ultrasound are in the 100db-120db range so you are talking like 300x the intensity.

Looks like Theranos 2.0.

Sure, it might be dangerous, but at least you wouldn't have to plug in your phone anymore.

I read that in Archer's voice.

And then there is the distinction between 'safe' and 'comfortable'. I have a pretty beefy ultrasonic cleaner here and the harmonics from that thing are what gets me, not the primary. It's definitely safe and yet I'm more than happy to move a door further away from it when it is running.

> "When skepticism based purely on vague assumptions leads to premature conclusions, it becomes blind cynicism."

That looks more to me like perfectly valid critique based on simple assumptions arising from an understanding of physics and engineering, hardly "blind cynicism". I'd instead say that this TC article itself is an example instead of "blind faith" by taking uBeam's claims at face value.

I'm still waiting for uBeam to even attempt to address the nonlinear effects of their proposed ultrasound frequency and power in air. Ditto for actually addressing safety concerns head on rather than casual dismissal.

I won't be surprised if they can power a cell phone in a controlled environment. I'll be mildly surprised if they can power one in a real-world environment, say sitting on a coffee shop table. I'll be amazed if they can deliver more than a couple watts, to accomplish (as appears on their website)

    A world in which every electronic device - hearing aids,
    tablets, sensors, light bulbs, computers, flat screen TVs - 
    could be powered simultaneously with one simple device.

Trouble is, it doesn't prove anything, or even come close to proving anything. The "uBeam FAQ" document, which is referenced multiple times to show the "cynicism" of the doubters, raises many issues which are not dismissed by this article. http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/

Nothing in this article addresses the skepticism in http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/. Read that document and you will see.

The "uBeam FAQ" document admits that it is technically possible under very limited conditions but mostly uses physics to claim that it will have tons of other issues such as massive power use, short range, potential safety issues, huge cost and other bad things. Basically that even if you did make it, it would be quite inferior to any other charging technology such as, say, wall outlets.

Let's say that uBeam's claims are true. Is it still viable from a commercial standpoint?

Wireless phone charging cases? There are already battery charging cases which would likely be the same price and provide power everywhere.

IoT? Not with the line-of-sight restrictions.

Large power consumers such as TVs? As noted in the eevblog forum post, the amount of energy required would make it impossible to provide constant power over a large distance...and having the device at a small distance mostly defeats the point.

When uBeam did demos, they did it to prove that wireless power is possible in controlled situations.

What uBeam needs is not "technical details", it's a credible witness reporting that they saw a working prototype. I am confident that will not materialize.

I disagree completely with this. Past claims that uBeam is infeasibly have rested on discussions of physics not engineering. Refuting these claims with physics is perfectly reasonable.

That gets you only so far. A working prototype would instantly silence all critics and since they have a patent there is nothing that would stop them at this stage from demonstrating such a prototype. uBeam seeks the attention and they seem to be upset that some of that attention is skeptical in nature. That's the problem of trying to stir up a whole bunch of press for something that you can't show yet (or maybe even at all) for whatever reasons. Some people - rightly or wrongly - will question your assumptions going on their own knowledge and understanding of the limitations of the technology as it is presently understood. The explanations that uBeam gives are grounded in physics but only if you take on the extra qualifier 'within laboratory setting'. And that is where the whole thing derails, the critics are making claims about real world settings whereas uBeam is talking (mostly and as far as I understand it) about whether or not their technology could work in a theoretical manner.

I'm fairly sure that given a $10M budget you could create a working device in a controlled setup. Whether that same device could then be generalized to the point where you can slap it in a home or a coffee-shop and expect to power the vast majority of the devices present and all that without inconveniencing or endangering people and other creatures present is exactly the point of contention. And I don't think anything short of a working demo will be enough to convince the skeptics.

So uBeam should either put up or shut up, no amount of PR fluff will move the needle, unless of course the world at large is not actually the intended audience of these publications.

A working prototype would instantly silence all critics

I'm not sure it would. The general view seems to be that this is feasible in the sense that under the right conditions you can indeed transmit power via ultrasound. (See below)

The issues are more around the fact that the energy loss is massive, and the there are genuine risks to human (and animal) health.

So a prototype isn't the solution, unless that prototype is a lot more than a trade demo, and actually operates in a normal home/office, over an extended period of time.

Evidence that many people think it's possible to produce a prototype, but not possible to produce a viable product:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527361

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527712

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527607

I think there is some confusion here about the difference between proof-of-concept and 'working prototype', those are most definitely not the same things.

The article itself is typical TC: a credulous PR puff-piece, not journalism of any kind. The best way to prove that something works is a demo. This story is about documents that could as well be science fiction, not a live demonstration of working devices. And the specifications they have published don't do much to allay the safety concerns that have been raised based on patent filings; if anything, they confirm them. The only really new piece of data here is that the frequency is much lower than previously speculated, which will reduce attenuation at the cost of being well within domestic animals' hearing ranges.

All UBeam has to do to put a stop to accusations of fraud is have someone independent demo and use the device in public. If it exists. It's that simple.

Agreed: with several years and tens of millions in investments, if it was possible, they would have some kind of demo.

This is where it gets tricky. They said they had a working demo (and this is corroborated by a number of investors) on which proper DD was performed prior to investing. I'm really not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it has me very skeptical on the other hand the number of reputations that will be tarnished forever if this turns out to be vapourware is substantial. You'd hope that those people putting their money and reputations on the line really did do their homework, uBeam would not deserve to get out of the gate let alone raise capital like that if their prototype never worked in the first place, it's not that easy to rig a demo for a savvy tech DD team (though I can assure you it has been tried).

What bugs me is that uBeam is on the defensive all the time they should just show their tech or be very quiet. No need to tell the world it works if you can't show it, who is the intended audience of all this 'good news'? Or do they have a bunch of unruly investors to keep quiet who are getting antsy and are starting to pick up on the skepticism? That might actually explain all this attention diversion, attention that might be better used elsewhere (assuming this thing can work at all).

They had a working demo in 2012. Here it is.[1] You're looking at a single big ultrasonic transducer sending to a bunch of little ones. The little ones are the same ones RobotShop sells.[2]

They're very vague about how much energy went in and how much came out. The big heat sinks on the sending side suggest that a few hundred watts are going in. The meter on the receive side is just showing voltage, so there's no indication of the actual energy transfer. There's no beam forming or steering.

Anybody could reproduce that demo, but it doesn't prove much.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI [2] http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-find...

Right, to me a useful demo has to have several attributes to prove the concept:

1. It has to take place in a real-world setting, perhaps a vacant hotel room or a coffee shop that has closed for the day.

2. It has to be monitored by independent technicians who can verify that the energy transmission is occurring via ultrasound, not some other means.

3. The transmitter has to be plugged into a normal wall socket (to establish a lower bound on efficiency).

4. The receiver needs to show how much electrical power it is producing, and that needs to be at least 3W.

5. The receiver needs to be held by a human, and for part of the demo the human should be walking slowly in a straight line.

After all, it's not that the transmission of energy via ultrasound is physically impossible. No one is asserting that (including, hilariously, the professors this "reporter" got to acknowledge is within the laws of physics). The question is whether they have the technology they claim, such that a reasonable person might plausibly hope to refine into a marketable product.

To me, a demo showing all of that would prove the key technologies: namely, beamed power transmission via ultrasound to a working receiver, receiver tracking, and at least basic short-term safety for humans. That doesn't mean there's a viable product here, of course; such a device might still be unsafe in many ways, it might be a hazard to animals, it might be far too inefficient to be useful, it might not be able to track more complex motion reliably, it might not work well or at all with multiple receivers, etc., etc., etc. That's the "multiplicative risks" people mention and many of the objections to a marketable product would still apply. But many companies have technically functional products they fail to bring to market or make a profit from, without being fraudulent. Multiplicative risks apply to almost any new product concept. Having a device that, whether marketable or not, clearly has the essential attributes that they claim would at least quiet the charges of fraud.

I'm a skeptic. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money on an idea futures market against them ever turning it into a successful product.

What I don't understand - if they are going to the trouble of tracking devices, why not use a laser to charge the phone? It would be way more efficient and all it needs is some human avoidance tech. To a laser/ccd people are huge so that shouldn't be too hard. The system would probably also be able to double as a pest control system for small insects too.

That reminds me, I bet their beam forming tech is legit but I'm pretty sure it's been done before. I remember reading awhile back about a tech company that developed a weapon for the military that let them put a voice in your head with focused sound that no one else could hear. I remember it because of how freaky/interesting/evil it was. But I bet even that would kinda suck in the field because of the line of sight problem they'd have. Pretty sure even your typical mujahideen would start moving his head around quite a bit if his god started talking to him.

> > If uBeam can deliver that amount of power to a phone with reasonable efficiency, reception, and electronic management, then their system does not violate the laws of physics.

> While he can’t vouch that the technology does work, he concludes that given the specs, it’s not infeasible. It will just be very tough to execute.

No, he concluded that he cannot rule out that it's feasible, not that it is feasible and is now just a matter of time. Works if you could just do "X" applies to a whole lot of ultimately infeasible technologies.

edit: formatting

That's almost straight from Douglas Adams. 'If it is virtually impossible that means it must be possible...' or something to that effect.

> uBeam promises it will being showing demos to people outside of its team, investors, and partners next year.

In May 2012, more than three years ago, Michael Arrington, who participated in uBeam's seed round through CrunchFund, wrote "In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary" on his blog[1].

[1] http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/

I've flagged this post because it has no actual science behind it, and just seems to be PR fluff to further spur investments.

I'm sorry, but _any_ sound at 150dB is going to cause harm to humans, no matter how high the frequency is. I will not buy any product using this technology (if any such thing ever happens, which I believe has an extremely low chance of happening), and I will suggest to everyone I know to also not buy it.

I'll support something like Rezence (longer distance/higher power competing standard against Qi), or just keep using Qi (which I have a Nexus charger for my Nexus 5, which is Qi).

A dog's hearing goes as high as 60Khz, and this this is transmitting at 45kHz to 75kHz...at 145-155db. I have a dog.

With one of these things going, one wonders how long your dog would continue to have hearing at 60Khz...

Seconds, minutes at best.

Some napkin math - they claim a device could get (at least) a 1.5W delivered.

They vary from 360W/m2 to 3kW/m2 (by the article). We could fit 83 galaxy notes 2 in one square meter (it is 0.012 m2).

360/83 = 4.3 watts that reach said device. 30% efficiency seems fine.

The problem is that the extra energy must heat something. And it will become worse with increasing of the power transmitted.

Heat is only a problem if you need to cool your space. Here in the Northeast it could be considered a happy side-effect for nine months of the year.

What about cooling my device? Dissipating a couple more watts while working will really be pushing the thermal envelope.

Pacific northwest too.

From uBeam's website:

"Through process of logical deduction, acoustic energy is the only type of energy that can be used for over-distance wireless power transmission. Since uBeam owns the entire ultrasonic wireless power space from an IP perspective, the world will have to leverage uBeam’s technology."

To preface: I find it extremely unlikely that this will ever see widespread consumer adoption if any at all. If it is indeed feasible to transmit power via ultrasound, there are additional hurdles to overcome. It will likely be high cost and reliability is an issue, and there is the question of limited appeal or application space. Everything I have that needs power has an outlet or easily available place to charge. I'm suprised they were able to trick not just people like Cuban into investing but also Marissa Meyer?

I can however see some use cases for this tech but just not for your average consumer. I bet someone could invent a surgical instrument that needs power wirelessly or there could be some equivalently niche use case for this kind of tech.

They are wealthy enough that the investment price means nothing to them if wasted, but if successful, this will affect technology on a fundamental scale

True, I didn't really think about also the possibility of backward linkages and the ability of the company to be worth it's investment value in terms of research and patents that can be applied to other use cases.

How is this better than a solar-powered (USB) charger? E.g.: http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/Solar-Charger-Reviews/Buying-A...

Light is a much better energy transmission medium than sound, it can be visible or invisible, focused, transmitted in a straight line (laser), easily routed via a simple mirror or encased in a glass fiber, and (with some notable exceptions) harmless. Also solar light is abundant during the day, as is indoor (albeit not nearly as powerful).

I was reading their website

>The most recent paper to investigate the safety of ultrasound was just published in the January 2016 issue of Ultrasonics.

Wow Jan 2016? Are these guys from the future?

No need, it's out now: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0041624X

If you find this puzzling, read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_date

God forbid if a journal reviewed its articles and told the people who submitted articles if they would be published, before actual publication.

It would take God himself to change any of the immutable, set-in-stone facts below:

1. Seven billion people cannot read the word "UBeam" without instantly knowing that they must be sold an acoustic charging solution, and would be confused and never buy anything other than an acoustic solution from such a company.

The idea of "UBeam" ever selling anything other than specifically an acoustic solution is as impossible as the idea of a Tuberculosis brand of cough medicines. It's happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds , a brand of appetite suppressant candies which enjoyed strong sales in the seventies and early eighties. You can imagine what happened after that.

Clearly it would take God himself messing with the minds of everyone on the continent before the syllables "ultrasonic transducer" weren't called to mind whenever anyone read the word UBeam. How can it mean anything else? It can't.

2. The Founder would instantly be imprisoned for shipping any wireless product that did not use ultrasound. No company has any right to pivot to making the exact same thing in an even slightly different way. The founder would be imprisoned so fast the trial could be argued in three days and a grand jury could make a decision in seven to ten minutes. Actually, I doubt even God himself could change the mind of a district attorney on this one.

3. $24 million is not enough to ship a wireless charging solution. Except ultrasound. This isn't something SMALL like the $5.5 million NASA just awarded Firefly to launch a small satellite to space - http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.h... -- we are talking about building something, say, as demonstrated in 1893 by Tesla, and ON EARTH. How would you do that with only four times as much money ($5.5M * 4) and change as a satellite launch, where by change I mean a remaining $1.4M ($5.5M * 4 + $1.4M = the $23.4M raised.) When you have a global headcount of twenty engineers on staff to maintain. God himself would have to change the rules of accounting so that twenty engineers and twenty million dollars would make it possible to ship any product. (Except ultrasound.) It's impossible.

4. No consumer wants any wireless charging solution, except ultrasound.) God himself would have to change these preferences so that people who wanted to charge their devices wirelessly could do so even if the technology were a hair off of what UBeam started with. It would be as absurd as thinking that anybody who had been buying a spinning-harddrive music player would also buy a flash-storage based music player from the same comany! In fact, I think God himself could not change people's preferences this strongly - after all, He has maintained free will.

6. No wireless charging solutions are possible. (Except ultrasound.) Now, it would be silly to even suppose that God could change the laws of physics themselves, just for one company. But let's assume that He would. It would take God himself to turn something that Tesla's photographer photoshopped into his studio, and make this magical parlor trick function. Would God step out of his way to make any other form of power transmission possible? No!

....

But Oh, if somehow God could step in and save this startup! It is as though they were stuck in a prison of their own devising; except it's not psychological, they are not free to step out of it. It's part of the laws of God and the physical universe.

Tragically.

looks like you guys seriously don't get it. Nothing stops them from pivoting to doing any other form of power transmission, they have the brand, and the money, and it's possible.

They just don't want to. Like someone insisting on releasing a certain specific technology instead of anything else in that space.

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