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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

Paper (linked in article) is here: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~gshyam/Papers/powifi.pdf

Disregarding the usual HN snark for media terms ("game-changing") and the usual criticism ("been done before", "won't be effective"), this is actually really cool. If we look at all the innovations in the past year, this is a pretty dang neat one.

They mention Tesla in the opening line of their paper. In short, the biggest innovation they came up with was solving the mismatch of Wifi operation and optimal power transmission. Read the paper; it's quite good stuff.

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It is interesting and could be a game changer for the 'internet-of-things'. WiFi is everywhere and just to be able to run a device a couple of seconds per day without having wires attached to it could enable a huge number of applications.

This got me excited about the idea. Like many others my first thought was that it can't be nearly efficient enough to charge my phone, but I hadn't even considered all the little low power sensors I could place around the house that I wouldn't bother with if they all needed to be wired into mains power. Think window break and door lock sensors, etc.

> Think window break and door lock sensors, etc.

A fun tech I had in my hands once that I haven't seen being use anywhere is turning kinetic energy into power. I've played with a light switch that can generate enough energy from you just pressing them, that they can boot up an internal uC, a radio, and then send a signal. The device had a typical home-automation range of several meters. I've been told that there are versions mounted into window handles, etc.

Yes, exactly. Charge slowly and discharge fast.

It's not "game-changing" nor "interesting", because it's "been done before" and "won't be effective". Sorry, had to be done, because tit's the truth.

Whether it can't be effective or not is up for debate, that mostly depends on your application.

Sorry, forgot to change effective to efficient.

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