EEVblog 1408 - $5M WiGL Wireless Charging BUSTED!

[langwadt]

They seem a bit obsessed with these loopy capacitors.    

"Please note that WiGL adds a capacitor in the loop. This is often lost when people consider our method(s) and differentiation.
Meaning the point-to-point and point-to-multi point transmissions (Tx’s) beams of directed energy are being used to “recharge the capacitors” (read as, standard power bank charger). Today’s consumer is not willing to wait days for our devices (i.e…phone’s battery) to recharge on a slow trickle recharging network. So the power bank recharges the phone…while the WiGL network manages and slow trickle recharges the power bank(s) using directed energy (not omnidirectional).
...
As we’ve presented here, the capacitors can be software managed, remotely recharged or tracked via the WiGL enabled Gen-1 Rx Dongle or planned Gen-2 Rx inside the mobile devices."

I guess the marketing droid got confused between a battery and capacitor. Maybe Google translate didn't work... It makes less than zero sense to wirelessly charge a power bank which then charges a phone through a cable.

even less when the average energy is less than the phone uses

[jchabloz]

Here is an academic paper that gives some background introduction of the algorithm and hardware of RF focusing. I only took a brief look but FIGs. 40-41 appear to be an experimental demonstration of focusing in depth (around 1 meter).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347177646_Dynamic_Focusing_of_Large_Arrays_for_Wireless_Power_Transfer_and_Beyond

I have taken a good look at the paper of Hajimiri et al. as referenced by nanotube in his post. BTW, this paper has been published in the July issue of the IEEE JSSC, so it is very fresh!
It is a great read, providing all the serious engineering that we expect from a team out of Caltech. The paper focuses on the practical implementation of the necessary dynamic microwave beamforming and is extremely interesting since it seems they have done what WIGL should have in terms of theoretical analysis and HW prototyping.
Notably, they calculate the theoretical upper bound (stressing "theoretical", everything is optimal and simplifying assumptions are made) for the wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency as a function of parameters such as the sizes of the antenna arrays, carrier wavelength and the transmission distance (and yes, let's not WIGL, the result is in the best case inversely proportional to the square of the distance, this is actually not a debate). If we focus on ca 2.45GHz carrier frequency (which corresponds to the WIGL "demo" case), a theoretical upper bound of 10% at 1m is calculated for reasonable antenna arrays sizes (10cm x 10cm for the RX). With similar conditions, a >80% theoretical efficiency should be reached for a 10GHz frequency (which corresponds to the Caltech/Guru HW setup used for the paper).
As a conclusion, it seems that they indeed demonstrated that the transmission of a >2W DC power at ca 1m of distance seems to be feasible with some clever adaptive beamforming.

This being said, one specific thing bothers me a lot in this paper; I have not seen anywhere (unless I missed it) any mention of the power transmission efficiency, nor alternatively, any figure of the transmitted or consumed power by their so-called "generation unit" (GU) to obtain the figures shown. You'd think that they should have, given that they propose a way to calculate the theoretical upper bound for such an efficiency at the beginning of the paper. It would have been interesting to compare their results with the theory.

Anyway, I think that the discussion here would be more interesting based on the serious results proposed by the Caltech/Guru team rather than to continue blabbing about the marketing nonsense of the WIGL guys.
Any engineer from the Caltech/Guru team reading this? It would be very interesting (and fun) to continue the discussion and maybe see if you could challenge some of Dave's skeptical assertions on wireless power transfer.

As for me, I share the skepticism of many here, with the following key considerations:

• The main issue is always going to be the transmitted power. As already highlighted in several of the previous posts, even assuming a more-than-ideal situation where the wireless power transfer (WPT) would be 100% efficient, for applications where several Watts of available power would be required, we are always going to be outside any reasonable regulatory boundaries, especially considering the fact that the beamforming (by definition a non isotropic radiated power) needs to be factored in when calculating the EIRP compliance (or maybe some specific regulations could/should apply?)
• This is made even worse if you'd like/need to share the same power source between multiple consumers. You'd need to find a way to share it. In the Caltech/Guru paper, they propose a time multiplexing scheme, which in itself makes sense. However, you also have to consider that the average power available is also going to be divided by number of user (independently of the sharing scheme, no suprise here)!
• Even if regulatory requirements could be taken care of, thanks to heavy lobbying, you'd need to consider potential health hazards; do you really want to have your mobile phone charged by a focused microwave beam of >1W in your pocket right next to some interesting parts of your anatomy ?
• ... and I'm not even talking about cohabitation. Maybe easier if we don't target the crowded 2.4GHz ISM band, however, the rest of the spectrum is not free either! Not sure how this is proposed to be tackled... Maybe by getting specific spectrum allocated?
• Practical size(s) aspects; obviously, and this is clearly explained, the efficiency also depends directly on the sizes of the TX and RX antenna arrays. Depending on the targeted applications, this could obviously be a very limiting factor
• Environmental considerations; is it ethical to develop and promote a technology that, even if optimized, will always be significantly less efficient (energy wise) compared to using wires? Since this errs on the fringe of this forum's terms (no political topics), let's put it aside and focus on technical stuff, but still...

[EEVblog]

When asked by a commenter to make the engineers understand better whilst being challenged by Dave they start talking about trade secrets/pulling down video's to blur bits out of it.

The video has already been seen what difference is it going to make now.

It just sound bullshit to me and it seems to getting sillier.

Are they really? Morons! Bet they are gonna turn off ratings and comments now too. Hell, maybe they'd even try to copyright claim against Dave because that's what idiots on YT do.

FIU July 2021 Demo V2




It looks like they don't seem to be liking the comments so they turned them off and I can still see the "trade secret" behind that blur.

Actually I wonder if is has anything to do with them categorizing that video for kids by accident.

Ratings not look good for that one.

Just noticed something else that all their videos are between 720p - 1080p but they reduced this one to 480p.

Yep, reduced to 480p and blur.
They did this not because it actually shows some advanced new tech they didn't want released, it's so they can claim exactly that to their audience, and let people's imaginations run wild. Classic marketing trick.
You can see the original full res version in my video, it's just a bunch of capacitors whacked onto the same energy harvesting units.
They say it's 1W, and yep, they'd be transmitting 1W and receiving 10's of mW, and the bulk capacitance is storing the charge for the phone.
Nothing new here, move along now

[EEVblog]

As for me, I share the skepticism of many here, with the following key considerations:

• The main issue is always going to be the transmitted power. As already highlighted in several of the previous posts, even assuming a more-than-ideal situation where the wireless power transfer (WPT) would be 100% efficient, for applications where several Watts of available power would be required, we are always going to be outside any reasonable regulatory boundaries, especially considering the fact that the beamforming (by definition a non isotropic radiated power) needs to be factored in when calculating the EIRP compliance (or maybe some specific regulations could/should apply?)
• This is made even worse if you'd like/need to share the same power source between multiple consumers. You'd need to find a way to share it. In the Caltech/Guru paper, they propose a time multiplexing scheme, which in itself makes sense. However, you also have to consider that the average power available is also going to be divided by number of user (independently of the sharing scheme, no suprise here)!
• Even if regulatory requirements could be taken care of, thanks to heavy lobbying, you'd need to consider potential health hazards; do you really want to have your mobile phone charged by a focused microwave beam of >1W in your pocket right next to some interesting parts of your anatomy ?
• ... and I'm not even talking about cohabitation. Maybe easier if we don't target the crowded 2.4GHz ISM band, however, the rest of the spectrum is not free either! Not sure how this is proposed to be tackled... Maybe by getting specific spectrum allocated?
• Practical size(s) aspects; obviously, and this is clearly explained, the efficiency also depends directly on the sizes of the TX and RX antenna arrays. Depending on the targeted applications, this could obviously be a very limiting factor
• Environmental considerations; is it ethical to develop and promote a technology that, even if optimized, will always be significantly less efficient (energy wise) compared to using wires? Since this errs on the fringe of this forum's terms (no political topics), let's put it aside and focus on technical stuff, but still...

Sound an awful lot like what this guy said here

[jchabloz]

Sound an awful lot like what this guy said here

Right! Definitely should've watched it again prior to making my points... 

[Brumby]

I do research in RFID and backscatter radio technologies, and this stuff makes me absolutely cringe.

Most of us here don't - but we are all cringing.

- To have sufficient power to charge anything, you will blow up any other surrounding electronic device (and bake your brain in the process) .

That perfectly sums up my first reaction to the idea!!

[varmpatel224]

I do research in RFID and backscatter radio technologies, and this stuff makes me absolutely cringe.

Most of us here don't - but we are all cringing.

- To have sufficient power to charge anything, you will blow up any other surrounding electronic device (and bake your brain in the process) .

That perfectly sums up my first reaction to the idea!!

A team from FIU (authors of this Scientific Reports piece) seem to disagree: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97528-5

[thm_w]

A team from FIU (authors of this Scientific Reports piece) seem to disagree: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97528-5

Good paper and data, but, did you read it?

"The system consists of continuous wave source (Tx) to generate RF power at 2.4 GHz, which is amplified to approximately 1 W power (in compliance with FCC regulations14) and fed into an antenna array with 22 dBi gain."

"The received power was recorded using a spectrum analyzer. As shown on the graph, power as high as 4.5 dBm (3 mW) is obtained."

0.3% efficiency, can't get much worse than that.

[madires]

"The system consists of continuous wave source (Tx) to generate RF power at 2.4 GHz, which is amplified to approximately 1 W power (in compliance with FCC regulations14) and fed into an antenna array with 22 dBi gain."

That's about 158 W EIRP which exceeds the EU limit of 100 mW EIRP for the 2.4 GHz band by 1580 times.

[StillTrying]

Looks like it's all going grate.

Why I get a message saying my invest is not complete?

Has anyone received any updates from WiGL? The email bounced back the first time I emailed them and no response to any emails since.

Please forward to me a cell or phone number of your investor party or customer service. I am worried that this might have been scam?

I have been charged $275 for ownership, and 1035.05 for WIGL. I like to talk to someone about this investment. I am not sure how this money is invested, and how can I see if its making

I emailed: Investor@WiGLInc.com. I got a message back saying the email address was not found.

https://www.startengine.com/wigl

[madires]

https://www.wiglinc.com: This site is under construction

[Kean]

https://www.wiglinc.com: This site is under construction

Their website is https://wi-gl.com/
They presumably only use wiglinc.com for email, but the least they could do is set up a redirect to wi-gl.com

[TomWinTejas]

And it looks like they're looking to raise another $20M again. 

[EEVblog]

And it looks like they're looking to raise another $20M again.

Isn't that continuation of the video I did a while back?

[robca]

And it looks like they're looking to raise another $20M again.

Isn't that continuation of the video I did a while back?

It is. And they raised another ~$900k from the date of your latest video, unbelievable. The funniest comments in their Startengine page are from the scammers with $30M in a bank looking for someone to help them transfer the money 

If I may, one thing that you didn't cover enough, is that for energy harvesting, the big receiver antenna *and* the big capacitors must be in the device being wirelessly powered. Want to charge your smartphone? Either buy a smartphone 5 times bigger than today's, or carry with you a WiGL gizmo that harvests power and every now and then you connect it to your phone to dump the energy in the capacitors. Or, you know, you could buy either a smartphone with a bigger battery or one of those "newfangled" power banks, which will be much smaller than any WiGL receiver (and work much better). They can talk about future development all they want, but the antenna size can't be reduced without directly impacting the power receiving ability. So any wirelessly powered WiGL device must be big

Also, a smartphone with 10mW will not charge. Will just discharge a tiny bit slower. So the 5x bigger smartphone idea won't work either, because even assuming you can continuously stay in the sweet spot at 3' from the charger, you still get less energy than the phone uses in standby

[TomWinTejas]

And the bullshit continues... predictably they have begun to pivot to distract investors they have been misleading towards magnesium-air batteries as portable power source to charge your electric vehicle.  My guess is that they're going to use batteries to provide actual power in their demos to charge a mobile phone and then show how they're transmitting power to the charging circuit, neglecting to show how little power is input versus output.  By adopting magnesium-air batteries they can try and dazzle investors with new technology that makes them look even more innovative while distracting the investors from their inability to deliver usable power wirelessly.  They're already doing this bait and switch with lithium ion USB battery banks, but that's not quite as sexy.

The discussion section on the investing page has some real gems from the founder.  He claims that using 3 x 3W transmitters they can charge an iPhone from 0% -> 100% in under 2 hours.... of course this too is when there are USB battery banks in the path, so just ignore that part of course.  He also says, "We were pulled into the internet web of debates about wireless power last year and made a corporate decision to stop explaining the whole industry and concept(s) of wireless power….and just focus/show/prove our niched part of touchless Wireless Power Transfer (tWPT) + results." 

[EEVblog]

WTF they just raised another $2.8M? 

[SiliconWizard]

Why, of course!

Oh and the investors will be poor victims!

[robca]

WTF they just raised another $2.8M? 

Don't forget that people invested in Theranos and FTX, among many other scams. "There's a sucker born every minute", some of them with enough money to throw away.

A lot of small retail investors (who can't afford to lose money) are in full FOMO mode, and they are ready to fall for scams like these, open to everyone. They see all those rich people making money with crypto and other crazy investments, and want a way to make money, too

[rthorntn]

Probably much more feasible:

https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/scientists-discover-enzyme-that-turns-air-into-electricity,-providing-a-new-clean-source-of-energy

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current.

[nixxon]

Unfortunately TED Talks has recently hosted this GURU guy, Ali Hajimiri, to spread his wireless power BS: https://youtu.be/RxrB7PDLJ18

Long answer is Guru is using phased array to focus RF energy in the mm-wave range. You can learn more from their patent here: (just google) US10,880,688.

Exactly the same as Xiaomi Mi :