UBeam CEO Meredith Perry Steps Down | Hacker News Reader

UBeam CEO Meredith Perry Steps Down

axios.com

20 pointsshmatt13 comments

It's a sad time for wireless charging technology. Apple also claimed they would launch wireless charging in 2018, but also might be unable to deliver due to fundamental engineering problems.

http://sonnydickson.com/2018/09/16/what-really-happened-to-a...

Apple seems to be incapable of making a good Qi charger Anker and Belkin fast wireless chargers work just fine with iPhone X/Watch which support it.

Apple can dress its tech as much as it wants but Qi chargers still work not all of them but all the good ones do.

I think from a physics perspective this never made sense for power for devices like laptops/phones, but might have developed expertise for communications or for sensors or other very low power devices. But maybe they never did that.

"3/ Meredith oversaw uBeam's transition from consumer-facing mobile charging to b2b licensing for IoT that you'll hear a lot more about in the months ahead. She oversaw scores of patents filed and many granted in an important market area of ultrasonic energy transfer"

https://twitter.com/msuster/status/1042866486367285248

I'd just be curious of a derivation of how much energy can be transmitted by ultrasonic energy transfer without causing hearing damage due to prolonged exposure.

If you google around there has been a decent amount written by physics folks about how ubeam could never work doing exactly this sort of calculation. They show that the amount wouldn't be useful to charge a phone or other similar device.

But I guess it might be useful for other things? I dunno.

For small IOT devices, the primary benefit would be to charge from a distance (wireless charging) but then the efficiency of the ultrasonic energy transfer will also drop inverse square to the distance. And if the power requirements are low enough, why not live with a lithium batter that will last 5-10 years possibly?

I can think of some specialty environments where batteries fail (due to environmental, temperature, acceleration, etc.) but where energy-transfer would be good. I can separately think of times when RF/induction/etc. wouldn't be good, but ultrasonic might be good.

Never a big believer in energy over ultrasound. Maybe for low amounts of power it could work. But so could power beamed over IR lasers into photovoltaic patches. And lasers would work better.

I've been wondering what happened to this company. I've been curious from a physics perspective if their technology is even practical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dqzVlhFkA

EEVBlog and a few other YT channels go over debunking and the basic physics behind it.

Looks like 1.5W energy transfer in optimistic case if willing to waste a lot of the energy.

Makes sense given that this is basically Theranos 2.

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