Maybe we have a future with no charging cords and just being at home and your phone is automatically charging from your “Wireless Charging Router”.
Sorry if this sounds stupid lol. I like to imagine weird ways we can use technology.
Yes. Google far-field wireless power.
It’s not really ready for prime time, and there are a lot of things still needing to line up for it to become ready, but it’s coming eventually.
I believe you would end up inducing currents in any metal surface in the house. Causing them to heat up, or if they are un-shielded electronics, zapping them.
“Your house is a microwave”
The new alt top 10 single from John “Tinfoil Era” Mayer.
(No idea JM’s relation to conspiracy thought)
Pah. Make your whole house out of plastic and rubber. Checkmate big cable
Just move to the forest bro, wood is nature’s plastic
@Randomgal @Quadhammer what forest is available and free to move to
While travel there is inadvisable, I’m sure you could find a place to live in “The Zone of Death”, a 50 squsre Mile section of Yellowstone National Park that is between jurisdiction for states and is largely unpatrolled. Travel there is highly inadvisable because of you get hurt, you’re not gonna get found, and you’re probably gonna end up prey or starve to death.
Additionally, crimes are nearly impossible to try if committed in the area due to requirement of a jury trial. It is impossible in the area to establish a jury of residents, as the area is uninhabited.
I would seriously doubt it, not because it’s impossible, but because it’s massively impractical.
It turns out that wireless charging is shockingly inefficient. The antennas you would need are way bigger than you could carry practically, and the amount of power you receive is very tiny compared to the amount of voltage you’re pushing through.
A YouTuber I like actually built a setup like this in a recent video.
Also, cancer.
The energy in a wave is inversely proportional to distance squared. In other words if you double the distance you get one quarter of the power.
For information transfer like wifi this does not matter as long as it’s enough to be detected.
For power transfer this becomes a huge problem quickly because it’s the energy itself that is being transferred.
It’s also important to note thst the increased power required significantly better cooling- on both devices.
Nikola Tesla did a lot of research on inductive transmission and found it was basically useless for high power and long range. (Interestingly, he wanted to create a shield that would fry anything metallic coming near it. Like artillery shells and airplanes. Besides the power demands being utterly ridiculous, it could have conceivably worked.)
Better use of power than LLMs.
In other words to meaningfully power stuff that is a just couple meters away you would need a source so powerful that it would either kill you or all the electronic devices in its vicinity. A nice styropyro video to illustrate https://youtu.be/6TgrtA2wKaM?t=144
Do you mean in a house with showers and sinks?
So lots of hand waving comments here which are only mostly right. The key thing they are missing is that there are multiple wireless power technologies for different power levels, some of which are already commercial and available to buy!
Powercast (www.powercastco.com) has multiple techs now that they either developed or licensed and they have integrated that into multiple FCC approved products. The Samsung TV remote uses both a small solar cell and their wireless energy harvester to make a remote that you never have to replace the batteries. Powercast also sells a joycon controller grip that has a battery with wireless trickle charging (done with playing for the day, leave the grip within 1-2 feet of the base station and it charges overnight). They also have a lot of other currently used applications that are not public (I’ve seen functions with low power charging over 1 meter distance), but if you ever go to CES you can check out their booth.
Another option is Ossia (www.ossia.com) which uses a tech to monitor for obstructions (people, pets, tables, etc) and then steers the power beam around to be able to provide the most power and the least power loss. As another user posted this requires a lot of trust because the power levels they use could cause injury, but they apparently did pass FCC testing. They also are commercial.
Airbrite (https://www.airbritelighting.com/) is a product commercialized from Etherdyne tech (https://www.etherdyne.net/) that is your standard inductive coil with some improvements. This is shorter range power than the other two but can provide much higher power with zero risk to biological parties. The video on Etherdyne’s website shows one mat powering a monitor, charging a phone, a lamp, and possibly charging a laptop at the same time. That being said, the products need to be within a coil’s field and almost completely in plane to get full power transfer.
IIRC this was kind of the dream of either Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison (I forgot which one). But no, it’s not really possible, as others have said.
This was what Tesla Coils did. They allowed for the wireless transmission of power. It was Tesla’s utopian dream to provide free power to all.
If you want to drive your vacuum cleaner by wireless energy, you’ll probably need energy levels in the air that would also kill flies and mosquitoes. And pets and people, too.
You had me at the first half
Not for a full house, but there are per-room solutions on the market today.
The problem is the rule of squares… for the field to be strong enough to charge devices at the edge of its range in a house, it would have to be strong enough to scramble all electronics and possibly cook your food at the emitter.
But one per moderately sized room? Yeah; very energy inefficient, but you can get it installed today.
Ok, blue-skying a bit here…
There’s this YouTube channel I check out occasionally. The YouTuber built a “wireless desk” where everything from the lamp to the mouse, keyboard, and even a coffee warmer were wirelessly powered.
The core of it was a large induction loop built into the desk’s perimeter, paired with some surprisingly compact receiver dongles. Some parts required deeper DIY, like opening up the mouse and inserting a small receiver, but overall it was cool
Scaling that concept up for an entire house is a wild thought… but kind of exciting!
This is the only real solution. I would imagine a whole series of induction loops, that activate by sensing there is a device to power. Toaster from the kitchen can be moved to the table to do breakfast, put your phone down anywhere and it charges, vacuum the house wirelessly and without a battery. Take the espresso machine to your home office when working an all nighter.
