iPhone 6 Case Gets Battery Power from Thin Air

[valentinalucia]

A fully charged phone from thin air? That's the reality Nikola Labs hopes to usher in with its new iPhone 6 case.

iPhone 6 Case Gets Battery Power from Thin Air : Read more

 

[rrcaseyr]

Problem: it's for an iPhone. But interesting concept, hope to see it come to Android devices soon.

 

[jasonelmore]

not really a problem when 70 million are sold every 4 months

 

[hpram99]

That's not how this works. RF harvesting has been announced and debunked in the past. The 20dBm (100mW) your AP transmits is down to -20dB (0.01mW) by the time it reaches your device 10 feet away. So stray airwaves are out of the question.

Now we're going to break the energy saving technology in a phone, which transmits only the minimum power level needed to reach a cell station, and *absorb* that energy. Your device will now transmit at higher levels to deal with the shielding.

 

[leo2kp]

That's not how this works. RF harvesting has been announced and debunked in the past. The 20dBm (100mW) your AP transmits is down to -20dB (0.01mW) by the time it reaches your device 10 feet away. So stray airwaves are out of the question.

Now we're going to break the energy saving technology in a phone, which transmits only the minimum power level needed to reach a cell station, and *absorb* that energy. Your device will now transmit at higher levels to deal with the shielding.

I was thinking the same thing. Doesn't absorbing RF mean less signal overall for communication, and thus more power usage? I guess we'll see...

 

[ammaross]

Nikola Labs claims the case can power the iPhone 6 30 percent longer using this technique.

What they don't tell you is that to get even close to that "30%" the phone has to stay in sleep mode the whole time.

This case would likely cause weaker signal strength and likely gets near zero power from stray radio waves (only effectively harnessing radio frequencies from the phone itself).

 

[blarto]

The stupid part is harvesting your own wifi energy. Turn your wifi off for energy savings duh

 

[fuzzion]

All of you are right. There will be a small drop in signal strength.

 

[aldaia]

The only wasted energy in a phone (or any computing device for that matter) is heat. The day they invent a case that can convert heat back to electricity I would consider it as serious possibility. Anything else lies closer to the scam/hoax realm.

 

[Fabrice Lamidey]

http://hackaday.com/2015/05/05/techcrunch-disrupt-charging-a-phone-with-its-own-transmitter/