Posted on 05/05/2015 9:22:50 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Pull Battery Power Out of Thin Air with Nikola Labs
Nikola Tesla pioneered the transmission of electricity over wires. Heinrich Hertz proved it could be transmitted wirelessly. But we still use 19th centre technology to power 21st century devices.
Nikola Labs — which pitched today on stage after being selected by TechCrunch editorial team and the audience as the Wild Card choice from Startup Alley — launched a device that converts radio frequencies into DC power, and, they claim, can therefore power devices.
Today they launched their first product using the technology: a case for an iPhone 6. It converts the wasted 90 percent of energy the phone produces trying to pump out a cellphone signal, and puts it back into the phone, thus powering it for up to 30 percent longer.
Note: This is not an extra battery; it simply works passively. Essentially it is harvesting back the ambient RF energy already being produced by the phone.
They aim to bring the product to market within one year, in partnership with Ohio State University, where the technology was originally developed, and from there they have licensed the technology and patents.
They could also put this into many different devices, such as wearable technology, embedded sensors, medical devices and Internet of Things devices — anything that doesn’t require massive amounts of electricity.
It will be launching on Kickstarter in one month for $99, and they hope to ship it inside the following four months.
Appropriately, Nikola Labs launched its product in the very building Tesla himself lived and eventually died in.
Deminishing returns.
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Others have promoted this in the past, and while energy harvesting is possible using a range of energy sources, there’s not enough RF energy that can be converted to do anything useful. It’s another BS article about BS technology.
Show us the numbers.
Anyone else make a crystal set as a kid?
This won't end well:
Cell Phone Explodes
10-Year-Old Boy Burned After Cell Phone Explodes
"Student's Ringing Cell Phone Sparks Fire While Pumping Gas": A Follow-up from the PEI
Exploding Cell Phones a Growing Problem
And I've had a 'disconnected' vertical antenna on the roof that was really good at harvesting 'lektrikity. Don't touch the connector when a t-storm was brewing.
It didn't do anything useful, even with diodes installed in an attempt to harvest electricity.
/johnny
Even if this weren’t pie-in-the-sky magical thinking, wouldn’t trying to capture the phone’s energy emissions cause it to essentially “muffle” the signal it’s trying to get to the cell towers in the first place? If anything, this would force the device to use more power to push a stronger signal or one of longer duration in order to keep that connection alive.
Yup.
Then on to Archer kits from RadioShack.
From there to electronics in the military.
Code name Tunguska.
What could possibly go wrong?
Please tell us more about your interesting experiments. ;-)
There's a reason I've been married 3 times so far.
/johnny
Yes! Quakers Oats box radio, Foxhole radio and Razor blade radio.
Trying to pass that tech on to my grand kids seems to be NOT working.
Then again the oldest is 7. He IS beginning to grasp it but doesn’t yet see the use.
If they did that, they would understand why the technology never went anywhere.
Sure you can transmit energy this way, for a very limited distance with great losses. In otherwords, way more expensively than using wires.
Yes, I did, as an eleven-year-old kid from components. Dropped a gob of solder on my hand and had a scar that took several years to fade. Fun times! There were some nice kits I got later, including one in a plastic rocket with attached earphone.
“including one in a plastic rocket with attached earphone.”
That’s what got me interrested. Neighbor kid had one. Do I remember correctly that it had a ground wire and clip?
You do. . . and a thing-a.ma-bob that pulled out from the tip to tune in the AM station. . . mine was a cool red!
Four events ten years ago! Why isn’t something being done?!
Exactly what do the explosions of two Kyocera phones, a Motorola phone, a story that was determined by fire officials to have been started by a static spark from the person's finger (and says so in the article!), and a photograph of a cell phone tower have to do with Apple iPhones, or with a probable hoax system to pull power by tapping into the radio signals emitted from the phone? As far as I can see, there is nothing at all to attach these very old, non sequitur, unrelated events to this article.
Yes. We had a cast-iron radiator that I clipped the ground wire to it. No batteries needed for those things.
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