UBeam finally shows off its wireless charging tech

It's not a new idea--ultrasound is already used to power pacemakers, and people have been playing with the concept for years. However, basic calculations shows that this is not likely to be practical as a consumer device. The founder has no physics or electrical engineering background, so there's no reason to think that she has some unique ability to overcome these hurdles. She's also hasn't demonstrated that she's developed any novel techniques to overcome the engineering challenges.

So why all the VC money? Why give VC money to a 20 something with no experience and no background with the hope that she'll hire enough engineers to figure it out? It just doesn't make sense to me.

I said the same thing about Theranos. They basically gave an inexperienced person who had no real domain knowledge millions of dollars to run a research lab. It looks very similar. Are VCs just desperate for a media friendly founder success story?

edit: Turns out there was already a patent covering something very similar filed in 2003 https://www.google.com/patents/US6798716?dq=ultrasound+power...

Software VC would really benefit from a couple emag classes before trying to disrupt physics. These extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence. I don't want to be anywhere near any kind of field that's strong enough to power my laptop. Acoustic or otherwise. No thank you please.

I am curious how this is different from what she would have demoed to her angel investors several years ago.

Displaying that it's charging is very different from actually charging. It could look like it's "charging" but may actually take all day to finish charging, in which case the technology is completely useless.

I am especially put off by how the "startup community" people seem to be patting her on the back saying "it works!" even though none of them actually believes it to be so deep inside.

Literally ALL of the criticism around this company have been how there's a huge discrepancy between the demo and their actual product (hint: there is none), and she should have addressed THAT point (about how fast it charges) instead of doing another one of those deceptive demos that don't mean anything.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/

To trigger a charge detection on a phone, you only need to apply a sufficient voltage and be able to supply a small current. It will "charge" but may take days to do so.

As a minimum, the UBeam receiver must be able to generate 5W of power (1A at 5V) to adequately charge a phone (10W or more would be needed for a faster charge though).

Assuming that the technology is 100% efficient in its power transceivers (which is impossible), there is still the matter of exponential attenuation when transmitting ultrasounds through air: at 2m, to produce 5W at the receiver, you need to generate 25W at the transmitter.

This gets worse very fast. Even if you assume they magically manage to get extremely efficient, the laws of physic will prevent the technology from being useful beyond a couple of meters without requiring hundreds of watts of transmitted power. And we're not even talking about the actual performance of the transducers, or the fact that the angle between the transmitter and receiver can affect power transmission, as would air humidity levels...

UBeam will most probably end up producing something super-niche. On paper and in controlled demos, you can transmit some power through the air using ultrasounds. So maybe they'll manage to have an exhibit in a museum or some technology-of-the-future showrooms and they'll probably continue to have demo at exhibitions for years to come while not answering the difficult questions of efficiency and practicality with actual verifiable numbers.

Having an affordable, safe, useful, practical mass-consumer product though? Nah, not a chance.

UBeam is one of these companies build on wishful thinking. They sell a dream and get money from people caught in that dream. They can't back down now, so they have to keep up appearances and come up with polished demos from time to time just to keep the buzz and the mystery alive, and the money flowing.

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-sausage-f...

- it's a lengthy series of posts from the former VP of Engineering at uBeam, going into the politics and technological issues.

No proof whatsoever that it was charging anything.

Does that mean it's not real? Unsure. But this wasn't that convincing.

That doesn't prove it was charging, just that it could sense the ultrasound and throw up a graphic. Let's see it run for 30 minutes and show the Android battery app for proof.

Companies have demo'ed similar devices before, but where the rubber meets the road is the efficiency and total power of the system. In other words, if it takes 200 watts to transmit and 200 milliwatts received at 3 feet, it is not useful for a consumer nor the environment.

Of course you can transmit some power that way. But how much? And what's the efficiency?

Here's their previous demo, from 2011.[1] What they had then was a bunch of cheap ultrasonic transducers [2] aimed at each other. Those used to be popular for hobbyist robotics. Some unspecified amount of power was transmitted about two feet. Probably a few milliwatts.

The last time UBeam published numbers, they claimed to be generating a few kilowatts of sound power. Such things are usually used as weapons systems (see LRAD) or welders. You don't want to be in a kilowatt ultrasonic beam. The energy mostly ends up as heat.

This technology is either too low power to be useful or, if pumped up to useful power levels, too dangerous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI [2] http://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml

At the end of the day, after 5+ years and $25M+ spent ubeam is still quite far away from a viable consumer product. It would kill Meredith Perry to admit it, but the naysayers were right about the viability of this technology. At some point you've just got to cut your losses and move on.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/

Overall, it seems unlikely to work, even for trickle charging phones, under anything but ideal conditions.