Power beamed to camera via ambient wi-fi signals

bbc.com

20 points·Libertatea··10 comments

This is incredibly idiotic. They purposefully filled the airwaves with garbage packets, to collect bare milliwatts. And the "camera" took a B&W photo at tiny resolution and sent it nowhere.

They even used already existing (and not even the best) energy harvesting chip. The only innovative thing here is somehow getting this to get posted on HN

It might be better idea to use other ISM bands to power the device, and keep 2.4GHz as communications only and be a good WiFi / BT / Zigbee neighbor.

> keep 2.4GHz as communications only

communications and heating food

Or just inductive charging at a distance?

Completely. And the claim that "this doesn't impact wifi bandwidth" completely violates the laws of physics. As if the 2.4GHz band isn't junk enough already with noise.

And nor is this novel. Tesla did a large public demonstration of this in 1899. The only difference was the frequency and the target device (light bulb).

didnt the first digital camera start that way?

black triangle.

Well, at least they're not really forming wifi beams, which would run the risk of damaging your innards. But this still seems incredibly wasteful.

Psh. This is nothing. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/self_powered_camera...

An aside: I'm very glad that the BBC included a link to the actual paper, not enough news sources do that these days.

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