Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging | Hacker News Reader

Apple is working with Energous on wireless charging

venturebeat.com

39 pointsailinykh65 comments

Paul Reynolds, who worked at uBeam, demolishes Energous planned business model through physics [1] [2]. My opinion (and a lot of other investors) is that Energous is a scam [3] [4]. Their device cannot get FCC approval to transmit at the levels that they need to to send power, so it's a complete non-starter.

[1]: http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-g...

[2]: http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/those-other-g...

[3]: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3964405-wattup-mini-will-sav...

[4]: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3960298-stunning-admission-e...

Do you think uBeam is also a scam / impossible technology to deliver?

Planning on doing 'Apple compliance testing' is a zero cost thing to do, and has no effect on getting a deal with Apple. People seem to read into this statement what they want it to say - given Energous is a publicly traded company and their statements are covered by SEC rules, then take what they say at absolute face value, no more and no less.

My understanding, though, is that all of these wireless charging solutions are significantly less efficient that wired power. Even if it's, say, 10% less efficient, that's a huge, huge waste of energy on a large scale if this technology becomes popular.

Depends, how much energy is used in making cables that break, get lost ? Even though building the wireless adapter endpoints will also be costly ... hmm

Also, count how many failed/shitty cables you have had in your history- I've had literally hundreds of cables for charging only purposes. Fuck all that plastic and material waste when the cable only lasts N months...

Further, it pisses me off that every device has a diff charging interface. Fine, go ahead and have a diff data delivery cable for high speed file trans but fuck you to every manufacturer where the charging interface is unique...

I'm looking at you every laptop manufacturer ever...

Waste is relative. A smartphone uses around 1% the electricity per year of a refrigerator; I don't know if upping that even to, say, 10% would make all that much difference in the grand scheme of things.

Because I'm slow at work..

If we say the new generation iPhones have a 3,000mah battery, batteries are charged fully once per day, and that 100 million people in the US have iPhones:

3,000mah x 3.8v = 11.4 watt-hours to fully charge a phone -- at $0.15/kWh, this equates to a daily expense of ~$0.002 to charge your phone. Annually, this is $0.62. If wireless charging were 50% efficient, it would still cost under a dollar annually to charge your phone.

On a bigger scale:

11.4Wh * 365 days * 100M phones = 416 billion watt-hours annually to charge all the iPhones in the US. A 50% efficiency loss would equate to a difference of 208 billion Wh.

Enercon makes a monster wind turbine called the E-126 that has a 7.6mW generator attached. With a modest 40% capacity factor, you would only need 8 additional wind turbines to make up for every iPhone user in the US switching to wireless charging.

Actually a 50% efficiency loss would double the energy requirements to 800+ billion watt hours. Your original calculation is right for 100% efficiency in charging over wires.

Ah! Good point. I can't edit but double the turbines.

How much to make up for all the cancers people would get with increased radiation all around them?

Non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer

10% less efficient?

I think charging my phone loses about 5% in thermal losses at the connector (because it gets warm)

10% is both not important (in this context) and unfortunately optimistic

And this does not even consider the counterfeit adapters many people use. I think wireless might be more efficient than many badly designed adapters.

Why would it not be absorbed by proportional savings in heating?

Depends where you live. We spend more of the year running AC here.

Very good point.

This is true only if your home is running an electric heater. Burning hydrocarbons like natural gas, oil, and wood to heat your home directly is more efficient than using them to run a turbine to generate electricity, then run that electricity many miles to your home, then turn it into heat.

Teleporting heat. Got it.

District heating[1] has been around for a long time. At least here in Finland most people in cities use it.

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

I think it's more than 10%. At least 20%. Maybe even 50%.

Not only is it inefficient but I believe the heat produced while charging seriously degrades the battery and reduces it's expected lifespan.

Why do you believe this?

Its just from stuff Ive read when researching at a Qi charger to my phone. Temperature definitely affects battery lifetime.

Induction charging is definitely less effective, and loses a lot of energy to waste heat. This is why, when you take an Apple Watch off of its charger, the back is very warm.

This way they can remove the only plug on the new iPhones. :)

Honestly I'm fine with that if it means never having to plug my device in again. "The signals can travel up to 15 feet, and up to 12 devices can be charged at once." Sounds amazing.

You know what also sounds amazing? Signals that can travel up to 15 miles and up to 1 million devices charged at once.

I don't know why you added the smiley. Given that the watch uses inductive charging I expect their endgame is indeed to eliminate all the connectors. They can't do that though until there's a reasonable infrastructure of wireless headsets and people comfortable with using them as their default headset.

Having the watch as a primary interface will certainly need this capability.

Hell yes. This makes ruggedizing and waterproofing the phone much easier.

My favorite is still the cradle with contact pins that were on the original nexus one phones, no need to plug anything in, no need to align with magnetic grippers, just drop it in the cradle and it worked. Why did that ever go away?

Protective covers. Most are too thick to work with a cradle designed for a naked phone. Making a cradle with an adjustable width and depth is, apparently, either too difficult or too expensive.

What about spring-loaded retractable pins? They'd automatically adjust to any case thickness.

What a bullshit article. The "proof" that Energous is working with Apple is that they claimed in a 2014 SEC filing to be undertaking Apple Compliance testing... which they would need to do to make a charging adapter for an iPhone (mfi program), which is 60% of the addressable market for their supposed technology. So there's no smoke here.

True. To be part of Homekit you also need to go through compliance testing. It doesn't say anything over a close relationship with Apple. I wish I had, because I think how Homekit works can be improved considerably!

Ossia's Cota technology is a direct competitor to Energous' WattUp, but its transmitter device seems to be huge - I don't know if Energous' transmitter device also has to be that big:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfPgx51cas

I remember reading about this tech years ago in Business 2.0 magazine and thought it was the future, it would be nice to see someone bring it to market on a large scale. I also wondered a lot about the health implications, are there any?

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

So that'd be the third standard in addition to PMA and Qi? Or there are more already?

Work on wireless power transfer has been going on over 100-years, even Tesla worked on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer

Hard to imagine this being mainstream anytime soon. Is there any reason to believe this will become mainstream in the near future?

I wouldn't mind it. For a lot of my devices if you put on the wireless charger the wrong way you come up to a dead device. This would theoretically allow you to be fully charged if there were enough beacons in a building.

Most people would not mind wireless power that's not dangerous, but that is not a pragmatic reasoning behind why it will happen soon, but didn't happen in the past. Right?

It's almost like technology is constantly changing and advancing, weird. /s

Want to take it even further? "Wireless power transfer" has existed since the sun started shining. Sit outside on a sunny day, and you'll receive power through the transferred through the vacuum of space.

I know, I know, I kid. We're talking specifically energy transfer that is readily convertible to electrical current.

Like a solar powered watch or calculator?

Arguably, yes. Of course, the power requirement to recharge a battery for a calculator (in a decent amount of time) is a lot less than that for a modern cell phone. Same physics if your level of detail is Ohm's Law but very different in practice because we are talking about charging a phone batt in a comparable time to plugging it in.

Yeah, kinetic energy recharge of a phone is a pipe dream, last time I remember figuring out how much energy you can get from that, it amounted to walking across the USA from coast to coast.

Solar is equally crappy.

As a physicist, I am similarly skeptical. It seems quite unlikely to me that wireless power will take off within our lifetimes. However, if it does happen, I suspect it will be because of one of the following hypotheses:

(1) Electronics continue to become more energy efficient, to the point that a tiny wireless power trickle is sufficient to run them

(2) Perhaps computers will be an enabling technology, both in design (with E&M modeling, algorithm-assisted antenna design) and in operations (computer controlled beam steering)

Anyone care to share any other "post-mortem" hypotheses?

On the assumption that it happens? Well, you covered the more likely ones. Let me add one more.

3) Advances in molecular manufacturing (Drexler-style!) allows us to construct atomically perfect transmitters and receivers. This, somehow, increases efficiency to north of 90%. And increases range, too.

I think that one of the NVRAM solutions in development like Intel and Micron's 3D xpoint might have lower power consumption per GB than DRAM given the non-volatility and thus the obviated need to continually refresh the value. So if we were to see DRAM replaced by NVRAM (or at least augmented, where all but the most critical data were shuffled from DRAM -> NVRAM each time the screen locked), that might be a pathway.

I tried to find some numbers on this, but this is outside of my area of expertise. Would love to hear somebody more knowledgable weigh in.

What about it makes you skeptical? Stop holding out on us ... :)

They didn't quite do their homework, see update below article:

"The SEC filing statement from 2014 blankets any future anticipated testing and is not indicative of specific partners."

Soon they will achieve the ideal of minimalism, a featureless black slab that can only be distinguished from an obsidian block by turning it on.

I thought Apple already did wireless charging with the Apple Watch. Why is this news?

From the article:

... Bloomberg reported that Apple was exploring the possibility of including a novel form of wireless charging in upcoming iPhones, one that works at a distance and doesn’t require contact between device and power source. An analyst at Disruptive Tech Research (DTR) followed up by providing clues that Apple was working with Nasdaq-listed Energous to employ its WattUp technology for that very purpose.

I can't believe I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

"Energous’ technology involves more than just a charging mat to lay devices on top of. The company’s transmitter broadcasts proprietary waveforms directly to receivers and then surrounds those receivers with a radio frequency “pocket” that charges devices. The signals can travel up to 15 feet, and up to 12 devices can be charged at once."

This quote sums up the difference

>The signals can travel up to 15 feet, and up to 12 devices can be charged at once.

Wow, so if this technology became ubiquitous and transmitters were installed en masse in public places... we might in the future simply not even THINK about our device battery levels.

It'd be awesome. Shame it won't be this technology, which is going to be proprietary to Apple devices, though.

Yay a proprietary changing protocol so I will need how many different wireless charging stations?

Sigh.

People complain that they don't innovate and also complain that they don't use standards, you can't innovate while using standards I think

Of course you can. Look at the web.

Indeed. Microsoft broke with standards, and introduced the non-standard IXMLHTTPRequest API for their browsers. It later became a standard, but it certainly wasn't when it first happened.

Major innovation doesn't come from standards bodies, it comes from operational implementation and later opening up the implementations for standardisation. Unfortunately, Apple has not demonstrated a lot of interest in the latter part in technologies where it would be really really nice for end users (FaceTime, iMessage), but has in other areas that may benefit developers (Swift).

Who knows what'll happen in future.

No you can't. Look at the web.

The real issue is that our devices discharge much too quickly, and take too long to recharge.

By increasing battery capacity, improving the efficiency of our devices, and lowering charging time, the inconvenience of charging during the middle of the day when heavy use is likely simply wouldn't happen nearly as much.

Back in 2012, I picked up energy harvesting as one of my major project for wireless communications masters at NUS. Towards the end of masters I came up with a commercial idea of using energy harvesting for charging. Thus for summer that year, I ended up attending founders institute with idea of somehow commercializing wireless energy transfer. We got a team of friends, with my roommate PhD in physics, and a friend from electronics, and another friend from MS- mechatronics.

I proposed using wireless charging at short distance, after meandering for weeks with best use case, we ended up pursuing wireless charging for robots. Thus FLUXCHARGE1 came into existence.

When we realized that patent would be a major issue, which at that time was with Witricity2, we had to give up on the idea.

I did a quick homework of the situation and things haven’t changed much in four years. There are two major companies now pursuing it, (as mentioned here) http://www.energous.com/ http://www.ossia.com/

Also from R&D point of view my prof (Dr. Rui Zhang) from NUS is still pursuing how to do wireless energy transfer5

Reference 1. http://www.slideshare.net/arunabh010/fluxcharge-wireless-cha... 2. http://witricity.com/ 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508409 4. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devic... 5. https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/publication_SWIP...

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