Author Topic: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell  (Read 73739 times)

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Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Offline Lightages

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #1 on: August 07, 2014, 02:56:55 pm »
You basically got that debunked. Who needs to be so inefficient just so you can pretend to have convenience. I would guess a charging efficiency of like 10%. Some countries have banned the sales of incandescent light bulbs because they eat too much energy. Actually the stupid thing is that incandescent bulbs are 100% efficient in the winter when they also contribute to the warming of the house, and they are also nearly 100% recyclable without hazardous wastes being involved. Sometimes good ideas should just stay that, an idea. Wireless charging using sound waves is as stupid as the solar roadway idiocy.
 

Offline German_EE

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #2 on: August 07, 2014, 03:52:39 pm »
Dave, why not have a 'Fundamentals Friday' covering the Inverse Square Law on the whiteboard and then demonstrating it in action? You need not even use RF energy, a light bulb and your light meter will probably suffice.

And thank you for the reminder to charge my mobile phone  :-+
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

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Offline chicken

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #3 on: August 07, 2014, 04:39:02 pm »
That rectangular antenna is probably a "phased array"
http://www.olympus-ims.com/en/ndt-tutorials/phased-array/
Also could explain the highly secure communication they "stumbled upon". In theory if focus is perfect, only the targeted device can hear the communication.

Still leaves the problem of how to support multiple devices. Maybe the antenna contains dozens/hundreds of transducers that can be grouped to generate individual beams for several receivers at once.
 

Offline chicken

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #4 on: August 07, 2014, 04:45:46 pm »
Yup, phased array it is, from the 20120300592 patent:
Quote
Sending transducer 106 can comprise a plurality of transducers arranged in an array that can produce a focused beam of ultrasonic energy. Sending transducer 106 may include at least one Capacitive Micro machined Ultrasonic Transducer (CMUT), a Capacitive Ultrasonic Transducer (CUT), an electrostatic transducer or any other transducer suitable for converting electrical energy into acoustic energy. To generate focused ultrasonic energy via a phased array, sending transducer 106 can include a timed delay transducer or a parametric array transducer, or a bowl-shaped transducer array. Transmitter 101 can operate for example between about 20 to about 120 kHz for transmission of ultrasonic energy through air, and up to about 155 dB, for example. For ultrasonic transmission through other medium, transmitter 101 can operate at frequencies greater than or equal to 1 MHz, for example. Sending transducer 106 may have a high electromechanical conversion, for example an efficiency of about 40%, corresponding to about a 3 dB loss.
 

creepyoldenj

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #5 on: August 07, 2014, 04:51:14 pm »
Oh man!

It's bad enough that we have to live with RF spewing all over the place in a typical city
from an infinite number of wireless devices.

Now we want our phones to be charged with ultrasound from a distance,
despite various barriers, and incidental reflectors.  You'd have to soak
the area with a lot of watts even when the energy is focused on a user.
The shit will be bouncing all over the place.
I'd like to see how many watts of ultrasound it would take to transmit
enough energy to charge one phone in a reasonable amount of time, in a cafe space.
Not to mention the unknown health effects on people exposed to such intense ultrasound.

I think the project is about patent trolls creating patents, betting on the future use of ultrasound
that comes anywhere close to power or information transmission.

Just get up off of your fat(or boney) ass and plug in your phone's
adapter, sit back down, and lap up your overpriced coffee.
 

Offline chicken

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #6 on: August 07, 2014, 04:59:42 pm »
Re health, from Wikipedia:
Quote
Occupational exposure to ultrasound in excess of 120 dB may lead to hearing loss. Exposure in excess of 155 dB may produce heating effects that are harmful to the human body, and it has been calculated that exposures above 180 dB may lead to death.[44] The UK's independent Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation (AGNIR) produced a report in 2010, which was published by the UK Health Protection Agency (HPA). This report recommended an exposure limit for the general public to airborne ultrasound sound pressure levels (SPL) of 70 dB (at 20 kHz), and 100 dB (at 25 kHz and above).
Explains their "up to 155dB" limit. 
 

Offline Precipice

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2014, 05:17:35 pm »
I look forward to the appalling audible howl as these sources of continuous high power ultrasound beat against each other.

I wish I was shameless enough to scam like this.
 

Offline electronic_eel

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #8 on: August 07, 2014, 06:30:10 pm »
poor little bats - won't be coming anywhere near the city if this were real.
 

Offline German_EE

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #9 on: August 07, 2014, 08:09:31 pm »
The local dog population might object as well :palm:
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Warren Buffett
 

Offline amyk

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #10 on: August 07, 2014, 08:44:15 pm »
If these start to become commonplace they might be more functional as insect/bat/etc. repellers than power sources...
 

Offline eneuro

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #11 on: August 07, 2014, 08:53:34 pm »
Hopefully, local http://www.greenpeace.org/ members will not allow those devices to be used in public places   :rant:
Free energy is there in thunder storms and lighting  >:D

Each spot on this map is a lot of lost lighting strike energy.
All you need is LF RF antena to receive this energy and power "something" eg. crystal radio  ;D
It is much closser to reuse storms energy to Tesla Tower than those stupid uBeam's  :palm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower

Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy.
Inventor: Nikola Tesla
http://www.google.com/patents/US1119732

BTW: We have about 4 months to take this big idea back into the life and celebrate its 100th anniversary while it was patented to Nikola Tesla at december 1914-12-01  8)

« Last Edit: August 07, 2014, 09:18:28 pm by eneuro »
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Offline free_electron

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #12 on: August 07, 2014, 10:53:46 pm »
Not really crowd funding, so I've put this one here:

http://www.eevblog.com/2014/08/07/ubeam-ultrasonic-wireless-charging-a-familiar-fish-smell/

the bats will shit like crazy ... when they fly through the beam ...
« Last Edit: August 07, 2014, 10:55:50 pm by free_electron »
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Any comments, or points of view expressed, are my own and not endorsed , induced or compensated by my employer(s).
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #13 on: August 07, 2014, 11:13:16 pm »
A "power meter"  :palm:


And, well, this speaks volumes:
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #14 on: August 08, 2014, 12:47:11 am »
as much as i know (maybe somebody knows more), we are un-affected by inductive loop energy transmission

The good thing about it is that it's a very closely coupled resonate system, so not a huge amount of energy escapes. When no device is on there to charge the power drops to almost nothing.
But ultrasonics is a fundamentally different concept, it is power at a distance. Get in the way of that beam and well, I hope you've done adequate research...
 

Online coppice

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #15 on: August 08, 2014, 02:19:12 am »
Re health, from Wikipedia:
Quote
Occupational exposure to ultrasound in excess of 120 dB may lead to hearing loss. Exposure in excess of 155 dB may produce heating effects that are harmful to the human body, and it has been calculated that exposures above 180 dB may lead to death.[44] The UK's independent Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation (AGNIR) produced a report in 2010, which was published by the UK Health Protection Agency (HPA). This report recommended an exposure limit for the general public to airborne ultrasound sound pressure levels (SPL) of 70 dB (at 20 kHz), and 100 dB (at 25 kHz and above).
Explains their "up to 155dB" limit.

120dB causes hearing loss, but it takes 155dB to harm the human body. Isn't deafness harm? :-\
 

Online coppice

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #16 on: August 08, 2014, 02:20:15 am »
I can't figure out if she's a scam artist, or a classic display of the Dunning-Kruger effect. When she talks about the "power meter" in the video she speaks with the confidence of someone who doesn't even realise they are bullshitting.

Its easy to transfer substantial amounts of energy wirelessly, using several forms of carrier energy, provided you don't care about efficiency or collateral damage. Bring those two into the picture and everything changes. :-) Her quick Google to see if someone had done anything like she is proposing should have trawled up a lot of hits. We don't see too many of those in production use today. I wonder why? :-)

To be fair, she does address the focussing issue that Dave implied she skipped over. The video does say the charger and chargee need to be paired, and the acoustic beam needs to constantly steered, with the chargee constantly feeding back to the charger to control that steering. No indication is given of how a suitably tight beam might be formed, though. The patent applications all seem content free.
 

Offline othello

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #17 on: August 08, 2014, 02:20:22 am »
@Dave / All,

I was wondering, i remember reading a long time ago about Nikola Tesla and the projects he was involved in. This subject made me think of Tesla again, was his idea viable to provide wireless energy at long distances, what is your opinion ? Sorry for the newbie question if i'm opening now a can of worms :)

 

Offline djacobow

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #18 on: August 08, 2014, 02:20:43 am »
And, well, this speaks volumes...

Umm, that second video... wow.

I have a hard time believing she was talking to experts and getting wildly different answers. Much more likely is that she was asking wildly different questions.

Will it work? That depends heavily on what "it" and "work" mean. If "it" is a reasonably-priced product that not too complex and "work" means some modicum of end-to-end efficiency and not blasting people with 150dB+ of ultrasonic energy, yeah, no, it's not going to work. But I can think of other definitions of "it" and "work" for which this may be possible.

But the video is pretty astounding in terms of the sheer disregard for expertise and for engineers in particular. I guess that's what it takes to be a visionary. Maybe most visionaries are monkeys pounding on typewriters. Every once in awhile one types out of a few sentences of Shakespeare, then thinks it /is/ Shakespeare.

In honor of that Ted Talk, I give you the matching Onion Talk:
« Last Edit: August 08, 2014, 02:41:12 am by djacobow »
 

Online coppice

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #19 on: August 08, 2014, 03:19:07 am »
And, well, this speaks volumes...

Umm, that second video... wow.

I have a hard time believing she was talking to experts and getting wildly different answers. Much more likely is that she was asking wildly different questions.

Will it work? That depends heavily on what "it" and "work" mean. If "it" is a reasonably-priced product that not too complex and "work" means some modicum of end-to-end efficiency and not blasting people with 150dB+ of ultrasonic energy, yeah, no, it's not going to work. But I can think of other definitions of "it" and "work" for which this may be possible.

But the video is pretty astounding in terms of the sheer disregard for expertise and for engineers in particular. I guess that's what it takes to be a visionary. Maybe most visionaries are monkeys pounding on typewriters. Every once in awhile one types out of a few sentences of Shakespeare, then thinks it /is/ Shakespeare.

In honor of that Ted Talk, I give you the matching Onion Talk:


That Onion video is excellent.

She probably did ask the same question of a number of experts. Its a common effect. Ask a few experts if something will work, and....
  • Some will answer the science question "could this be conceptually demonstrated with no regard for other factors?"
  • Some will answer the engineering question "could this be made and deployed as a practical engineered product, causing little or no collateral damage?"
.
Its a matter of whether the expert thinks in a more sciency or more engineeringy way.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #20 on: August 08, 2014, 03:39:35 am »


look at our cellphones, have you held 1 and felt your hand getting "cooked"? it is a microwave after all?
No,never,because it doesn't happen------"smartphones" with huge displays may get warm because a bit of power is needed for that nice big screen,but it is not RF heating!

but you WILL never find a thorough medical expose online about how it wont affect you. but 1 thing is for sure, when we buy a microwave oven, the store calls it a microwave oven,
Yes ,because it is an oven---it's designed to cook stuff!
To that end,it places the food inside a tuned cavity,& exposes it to between 700 & 1300watts of RF,depending on the oven.
There is nothing magic about microwaves---RF heating at around 13MHz has been used for many years.
 A mobile phone is designed to communicate,using the minimum necessary power.
How much power do you think it is going to get out of that little battery?


 when you buy a mobile phone, they wont say it transmit in microwave, they will tell us its 900mHz?2.4Ghz? 5Ghz? in my opinion it is the "LEAD" poisoning happening all over again. this time, there is no "Clair C patterson" around to link microwaves to maybe ... cancer?
Numerous tests have been done over the years which show no causal relationship,but people keep on raising the matter ad nauseum.

or maybe, am i linking 2 dots that are really too far apart? lol  :-DD

One dot is somewhere out in the orbit of Mercury! ;D
 

Offline calin

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #21 on: August 08, 2014, 04:18:59 am »
Well .. I really think she truly believes is a discovery; and for her it is 100%.  The ted talk title  .. "how to become a technology innovator without an engineering degree"  ... says it all. The answer is you will be "AN INNOVATOR" in your empty balloon that is supposed to host a brain. Typical case of knowing so little that you don't even realize you don't know anything and you think you are an scientist; perfect test subject for this type of presentation.


Unfortunately this is a disease that we start seeing more and more all over the place. I mean peoples that so uninformed and naive on a subject that they truly think are experts on the subject and everyone before them in that domain was fundamentally wrong  :palm: . Remembers me of something that my grandpa used to say "Well ... everyone is an expert at agriculture and football .. problems start when you plant something that grows too big and you have to dribble around it."   
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #22 on: August 08, 2014, 04:34:25 am »
Her quick Google to see if someone had done anything like she is proposing should have trawled up a lot of hits. We don't see too many of those in production use today. I wonder why? :-)

Yep, I found all those links to research and articles on my first page of Google results, I think most of them pre-date this project by a long way.

Quote
To be fair, she does address the focussing issue that Dave implied she skipped over. The video does say the charger and chargee need to be paired, and the acoustic beam needs to constantly steered, with the chargee constantly feeding back to the charger to control that steering. No indication is given of how a suitably tight beam might be formed, though.

And therein lies the rub. As usual with projects like this there is no real proper engineering demo (after what 4 years and a million or two invested?). Just seems to be the odd mention from some tech writers or journalists who claim to have seen some sort of demo. Most likely those people would be fooled by the "5V output" nonsense too.

If I had this thing even remotely feasible I'd be making a dozen videos screaming to the world and investors - "Look, see, it really does work, it really is promising, look at the efficiency and tracking we are getting etc etc.
But no, after 4 years all we seem to get is a photo in the New York Times of, well, something?
Meah  ::)
 

Offline Precipice

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #23 on: August 08, 2014, 09:18:46 am »
I have a hard time believing she was talking to experts and getting wildly different answers. Much more likely is that she was asking wildly different questions.

It's always hard to know how to answer those questions.
If you go for 'Yes, BUT', the asker's brain shuts down in a cloud of $$$$ and glory after the first word.
If you go for "No", you're just being negative.

Perhaps the answer, when faced with a well funded and charismatic loon, is to say "I can [Whisper]try to[/Whisper] make it work. I'm good at that sort of thing, give me cash, not shares"

And then buy a lot of really good earplugs, ear defenders and hope your bones don't shake apart...
 

Offline eneuro

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Re: uBeam Ultrasonic Wireless Charging – A Familiar Fish Smell
« Reply #24 on: August 08, 2014, 11:43:23 am »
This subject made me think of Tesla again, was his idea viable to provide wireless energy at long distances, what is your opinion ?
Look at those experiments where 100 years ago in Nikola Tesla laboratory TESLA'S OSCILLATOR AND OTHER INVENTIONS - AN AUTHORITATIVE ACCOUNT OF SOME OF HIS RECENT ELECTRICAL WORK. where in one of them in the room wired around they were able switch the light on without any wires, but a small loop to lamp  >:D


However, do not try to do at home this one, where
Quote
LAMPS LIGHTED BY CURRENTS PASSED THROUGH THE HUMAN BODY
   ::)

Quote
The observer holds a loop of bare wire in his hands.  The currents induced in the loop by means of the —resonating— coil over which it is held, traverse the body of the observer, and at the same time, as they pass between his bare hands, they bring two or three lamps held there to bright incandescence.  Strange as it may seem, these currents, of a voltage one or two hundred times as high as that employed in electrocution, do not inconvenience the experimenter in the slightest.  The extremely high tension of the currents which Mr. Clemens is seen receiving prevents them from doing any harm to him.
It must have been very taff time for Tesla's team  :-DD

This is about what was in Nikola Tesla mind those days THE TRANSMISSION OF ELECTRICAL ENERGY WITHOUT WIRES by Nikola Tesla (March 1904)
Quote
On one occasion approximately twelve thousand discharges occurred in two hours, and all in a radius of certainly less than fifty kilometers from the laboratory.  Many of them resembled gigantic trees of fire with the trunks up or down. I never saw fire balls, but as compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially.
There are many other interesting articles written by Tesla too.
It is a big pleasure to read those articles from the past, especially while they display date like this
Quote
December 17
which means Dec 1917
, but those days we can feel the same while we can write:
Quote
August 14
but 100 years later  8)

When you see this stupid idea with ultrasound powered devices it looks like uBeam CEO should Google longer than a few hours to invent something realy not useless   :blah:
« Last Edit: August 08, 2014, 11:57:18 am by eneuro »
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“Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine”  - Nikola Tesla
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