EEVblog 1408 - $5M WiGL Wireless Charging BUSTED!

[MrMobodies]

https://guru.inc/try-guru/


That's interesting, maybe they could send Dave out one of these to tear down and verify their claims to see how they achieve it or how well it works.

The Eval Kit contains key elements of GuRu’s solution in a convenient desktop form factor. A generator unit (GU) and a recovery unit (RU) are included to demonstrate wireless power transfer from GU to RU at various distances.

FCC NOTICE: This kit is designed to allow:

(1) Product developers to evaluate electronic components, circuitry, or software associated with the kit to determine whether to incorporate such items in a finished product and

(2) Software developers to write software applications for use with the end product. This kit is not a finished product and when assembled may not be resold or otherwise marketed unless all required FCC equipment authorizations are first obtained. Operation is subject to the condition that this product not cause harmful interference to licensed radio stations and that this product accept harmful interference. Unless the assembled kit is designed to operate under part 15, part 18 or part 95 of this chapter, the operator of the kit must operate under the authority of an FCC license holder or must secure an experimental authorization under part 5 of this chapter.”

[nanotube]

Short answer is Guru was founded by Ali Hajimiri. That name itself is enough to attract investors like Motorola in anything RF electronics or photonics. There is no need for scammy crowdfunding.

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.

[EEVblog]

If they get the 5M the company says that they can last 18 months [I think I read that correctly].

18 months for $5M? 
What kind of salary are they on?
IIRC one commenter said they are only spending $50k on R&D or something?

[EEVblog]

If the above detractors are correct, then why did Motorola invest/spend millions for this company?
https://guru.inc/

Mark Cuban invested $15M in uBeam 

Here is how it happens:
Guru pitches to Motorola. Who saw the pitch deck and demo is dazzled beyond belief. So they ask the engineers "does this actually work?" and the engineers go "Well, yeah, it ""works"" (insert finger quote gestures) but..." and that's where menegment cut them off with "Thanks, that's all we needed to know."

[EEVblog]

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 :

[DrG]

If they get the 5M the company says that they can last 18 months [I think I read that correctly].

18 months for $5M? 
What kind of salary are they on?
IIRC one commenter said they are only spending $50k on R&D or something?

From the SEC filing (Form C): https://sec.report/Document/0001665160-21-000384/
__
How long will you be able to operate the company if you raise your maximum funding
goal?

The company plans to be able to operate for 18 months should this offering meet its
maximum ( - $5M) funding goal. Ultimately, the company has an agile structure and
can quickly scale its operating expenses according to surrounding circumstances and
operate effectively through all types of fundraising scenarios.
At a proposed burn rate of 0.83%, the maximum raise allows the company to operate
for 18- additional months.

WiGL, Inc.
ProForma Burn Rate Projections $5,000,000/$277,777per month = 18-months

__

18 month salaries total (benefits, taxes) = 2,956,000 - As you would expect in an offering everything is detailed [edit: i.e., financial plan details].

[GreggD]

This looked like a good investment.
Name: Orbsat Corp
Stock symbol: OSAT
If in the year 2003 you has 20.25 billion shares it would be one share worth $7 today.
They don't have the decency to go out of business.

Aug 19, 2019   1:15  Reverse Stock Split
Mar 08, 2018   1:150 Reverse Stock Split
Apr 21, 2014   1:150 Reverse Stock Split
Aug 25, 2009   1:150 Reverse Stock Split
Dec 29, 2003   1:400 Reverse Stock Split

[nanotube]

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 :

Thanks - I haven't seen that video about the Xiaomi. A couple of things:

• the Xiaomi Air video is not about "physically impossible," but more about market failure, which is different from WiGl's problem at the moment. Like the Xiaomi, GuRu does not defy the law of physics;
• I'm not sure if I can say GuRu is "exactly the same as" Xiaomi Mi Air. For example, the below CES demo (of 17 months ago) shows GuRu's phased array can focus to a tight (perhaps a couple inch, 2:29 in the video) spot that your hand would feel hot if blocking it. Ali is a well regarded professor in Caltech and you should feel free to talk to him. If anything, he literally wrote the book on low noise RF oscillators with Tom Lee, and his research in the past 10 years have made significant contribution to mm-wave phased array chips on silicon.

https://youtu.be/ZyPha9MdKko
 [/list]

[madires]

The story is about efficiency. You can build a classic AM crystal radio set which is powered by RF energy. Does it provide sufficient power to charge a mobile phone in a reasonable time? No! If you want to do that in the 2.4 GHz band you need a transmitter comparable to a microwave oven. 850W microwaves aren't particular healthy. It's the same nonsense over and over again.

[EEVblog]

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 :

Thanks - I haven't seen that video about the Xiaomi. A couple of things:

• the Xiaomi Air video is not about "physically impossible," but more about market failure, which is different from WiGl's problem at the moment. Like the Xiaomi, GuRu does not defy the law of physics;
• I'm not sure if I can say GuRu is "exactly the same as" Xiaomi Mi Air. For example, the below CES demo (of 17 months ago) shows GuRu's phased array can focus to a tight (perhaps a couple inch, 2:29 in the video) spot that your hand would feel hot if blocking it. Ali is a well regarded professor in Caltech and you should feel free to talk to him. If anything, he literally wrote the book on low noise RF oscillators with Tom Lee, and his research in the past 10 years have made significant contribution to mm-wave phased array chips on silicon.

https://youtu.be/ZyPha9MdKko
 [/list]

You missed the entire point of the video. It doesn't matter GuRu works slightly differently, or is slightly more efficienct or whatever. There stil remains the same fundamental practical problems of charging a phone wirelessly at a distance. As always, you can make these things "work" in the lab, but in practice they are doomed to market failure for a multitude of reasons.

[heliosh]

Good luck with that in Europe, 100 mW EIRP max. in the 2.4 GHz ISM band.

The TX antenna has 10 dBi gain? 10 mW transmit power limit for you.

[MrMobodies]

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.

[madires]

I'm not sure, but the blurred "trade secret" looks like a bunch of the energy harvesting PCBs mounted side by side in an acrylic glass using SMA connectors.

[Bud]

So how do you fit this contraption on or in an aviation helmet to charge it 

[madires]

Maybe with some hot glue. I wonder if it's a good idea to turn military aircraft into flying hot spots.

[hans]

Probably taking this whole scam way too seriously... but anyway
I do research in RFID and backscatter radio technologies, and this stuff makes me absolutely cringe. I've already seen papers from "asia" let's say that have looked at the math of "mesh" IoT devices that can "transmit power" to neighbours and perform communication. I see those papers as fantasy;  the English was probably up to standard (or not checked) and math looked fancy: they absolutely went crazy with optimization problems on this 'application' . But never taken into account some realistic RF channel properties or real world applications... Sadly, for some conferences this is what "peer reviewed" means.

Anyway, back to EE. RF-DC conversion is indeed absolutely inefficient. Just take a look at page 32 of this survey paper on the state of RFID, energy harvesting and IoT: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7404333

Most RFID passive tags (which are RF powered) have power sensitivities in the order of -10dBm to -15dBm incident power. The best RF energy harvesters top out at an (impressive) 30-40% efficiency with incident powers of -15 to -20dBm. So principally, if this technology is to become ubiquitous (e.g. you can use it anywhere without obvious deadspots), then atleast that amount of incident power must be present for *ANY* slow charging (microWatt's!) to occur. Oh.. and then start the problems:

Most modern RF chipsets halt operation if an incident power of that magnitude is present.  WiFi coordinators have collision avoidance that waits until the occupied channel(s) to become free again. The thresholds for this behaviour should be standardized, but turns it's not (some routers crap out at e.g. -80dBm blocker power, while others don't care). WiFi clients suffer from reduced throughput due to blocked subcarriers in the OFDM modulation.

Then there is also the problem that RF transceivers are not designed for in-band blockers, obviously, but also have limits for moderately strong out-of-band blockers. E.g. a Bluetooth transceiver may have a sensitivity of -95dBm, but also have an adjacent channel rejection ratio of only 50dB at 3 or 6MHz. That means it's sensitivity will go down proportional to an incident power that is stronger than -45dBm [assuming that ACRR remains a fixed value for any stronger incident power, which does not have to be case when e.g. clipping occurs].

And then not to say you can potentially damage RF frontends if a strong  signal of e.g. > -10dBm  is present. The aforementioned RFID tags or RF energy harvesters typically use detector-diode based circuits (e.g. Avago HSMS-28xx or Skyworks SMS7630/7621); which are discrete components that can handle powers up to 10dBm or so. But integrated circuits often cannot. Due to square law the variability of standing 1 or 2meters from a 30dB source is very large, and therefore, how is a "smart" or mesh network going to change anything to that? It's a fundamental problem of physics.

Ofcourse they will argue that transmission of wideband noise is going to solve this problem; but in my view, that will only problems worse. It will likely not only break WiFi, but a wideband Tx in 2.4GHz also kills Bluetooth FHSS interference mitigation. Bluetooth is typically quite resilient to work in noisy environments. IMHO it's also classic anecdote that impossible challenges steer to wideband solutions. RF-based localization technologies is also being researched for many years, and although I'm not an absolute expert in it, IIRC most accurate localization/ranging solutions also only work with ultra wideband signals. And a regulatory body is not going to allow that, because of the aforementioned issues.

So summarizing:

- To have sufficient power to charge anything, you will blow up any other surrounding electronic device (and bake your brain in the process) .
- To work with low power transmitters, you're fighting low-end power limits of RF energy harvesters caused by silicon junction thresholds.
- Using many many wireless transmitters to illuminate 1 receiver is absolutely ridiculous.

At that point buy a cable. Or if it's a really wire-constrained application, use solar panels.

[robca]

I'm not sure, but the blurred "trade secret" looks like a bunch of the energy harvesting PCBs mounted side by side in an acrylic glass using SMA connectors.

Yes, that's how it looked like when that video was not blurred. A carrier PCB with a bunch of those existing energy harvester PCBs side by side, each fed by one od the antennas below

[nctnico]

Ofcourse they will argue that transmission of wideband noise is going to solve this problem; but in my view, that will only problems worse. It will likely not only break WiFi, but a wideband Tx in 2.4GHz also kills Bluetooth FHSS interference mitigation. Bluetooth is typically quite resilient to work in noisy environments. IMHO it's also classic anecdote that impossible challenges steer to wideband solutions. RF-based localization technologies is also being researched for many years, and although I'm not an absolute expert in it, IIRC most accurate localization/ranging solutions also only work with ultra wideband signals. And a regulatory body is not going to allow that, because of the aforementioned issues.

You forget that the energy is not transmitted around randomly but directed to one point; namely the receiver. First the receiver is detected using a low RF setting. Once power levels are negotiated, high energy is transmitted while being directed at the receiver and there will be safeguards against the energy being obsorbed by anything else then the intended receiver. With magnetic coupled wireless power transfer you already have this problem; any metal object in the path will get hot quickly so the receiver and transmitter need to communicate some information about the power levels so the transmitter can determine whether it is safe to keep transmitting.

[hans]

Beam forming can only steer beams in direction, but not in depth, therefore it's not exactly a single point. As you say, anything that is between Tx and Rx is subject to potentially high incident powers, but also behind it. So that can still create problems for a similar range, and potentially even a larger range if higher transmit powers is used.

Theoretically you could setup multiple Tx, phase lock them, identify all devices in the area that need/dont need power, and then use both beam forming and each Tx's phase to control the standing waves to create antinodes for charging devices and nodes for sensitive devices.
I haven't looked into research articles yet if this has been done before. It probably is, maybe in some incoherent modulations.. I suppose it's doable in static environments, but I think it becomes very challenging when even the smallest amount of fading occurs.

edit:/ I fixated a little bit on dislocated setups, but cool to see that phased-arrays can accomplish power spheres already

[nanotube]

Beam forming can only steer beams in direction, but not in depth, therefore it's not exactly a single point. As you say, anything that is between Tx and Rx is subject to potentially high incident powers, but also behind it. So that can still create problems for a similar range, and potentially even a larger range if higher transmit powers is used.

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

[MrMobodies]

I'm not sure, but the blurred "trade secret" looks like a bunch of the energy harvesting PCBs mounted side by side in an acrylic glass using SMA connectors.

Yes, that's how it looked like when that video was not blurred. A carrier PCB with a bunch of those existing energy harvester PCBs side by side, each fed by one od the antennas below

Zooming onto the pcb looks a bit unclear to me (I checked on Youtube player set at 1080p) on the original footage from Dave's debunking video without the blur and it looks like they put the capacitors underneath their custom pcb. Resolution now reduced to 480p in their revised footage and zoomed into a bit. It was filmed at 1080p as checked by Dave see attachment. I don't know what they are playing at... oh the 5 million they are trying to raise.



Youtube transcripts:

37:08 - 38:12

here's their uh july 2021 wiggle this was only two weeks ago
where i haven't looked at this one yet so let's let's have a look
at this.

yep yep oh i'm sold i'm sold look at that okay this is
interesting look let's can we get yeah we got full full resolution
on that this is their latest demo as of a couple of weeks ago

it looks like they've got okay so the big pcb is just split in the middle they've
used two is that just like a giant dipole antenna using two you know fr4 pcb
plates little patch antennas so they got two four six eight ten ten patch
antennas receivers

so they got the same off the shelf energy harvesting units like that they might
now have they  might now have a custom pcb like that but once again that that's
that that's all they show is that it dries past and it switches on
right what what does that even show

oh it showed that it switched off at the end there it switched off
i i i don't, what so they get in tens of milliwatts now maybe

42:31 - 42:51

really in the real application you would have noticed in generation one
which they're called large capacitors on there now just to point out
you'll see the capacitors look at that they're huge they're absolutely enormous
you can store a lot of energy in those so they don't tell you how long they've been
harvesting the energy to put into those

[StillTrying]

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."

[robca]

I also can't help noticing that nobody from the company has joined this thread. They said a few times they would and that they welcomed the discussion with engineers, but they must have been rethinking after seeing that their buzzword rich vaporware technology was not flying around here.

Or, more likely, since they raised a whopping $4,999,105, just $895 short of their goal, there was no upside. They called it a success 6 days ago on their updates page, and decided it was time to start enjoying the loot the next phase of development: even more "software managed" loopy capacitors  , see below one of their latest replies (same as the post above mine, I just included ore of it and the part at the end). All they are pursuing is the goal to name  and license what anyone can do today with off the shelf devices, possibly adding some sort of harebrained DRM overlay onto it, and trickle charging a capacitor over time with pitiful amounts of wireless power. There's no real technological breakthru/innovation, just a delusional hope that once they start going around promoting their naming licensing, all companies will go "of course, how could not we see it before?!? WiGL!. Sign me up!". It's like a marketer just read a blog about capacitors and started going crazy about the possibilities of trickle charge, thinking no one else realized it before
 

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). The beauty of WiGL’s patented methods is that as you mentioned, all the tech to build a WiGL enabled system exists today. For example our competi-mates make FCC approved Tx’s at 2.4-24GHz and are within approved transmission limits. A number of companies also make RF-to-DC converters. And every major big box store or your local airport sells power bank chargers. For our demonstrations, WiGL has used these off the shelf products (with modifications to make them WiGL enabled system) to demonstrate our patented system and methods…with great results (soon to be published).

Like you, we are very hopeful that one day wireless power Tx-to-Rx tech will mature to recharging or powering handheld mobile device without a battery/capacitor, but the state of wireless power tech today requires capacitors in the loop to meet end user fast (faster/fastest) recharging demands (i.e…WiGL enabled Rx embedded in the phones case).

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.

[...]
Lastly, WiGL’s #1 goal is name dominance.

Meaning…In the year 2030…what will we universally call wireless power? WiGL’s business case and value proposition is that all forms of wireless power will be called WiGL. And we are patenting the tech so consumers can pay subscriptions for the convenience of wireless power services; similar to how consumer pay today for internet or WiFi…hence the name WiGL.

[madires]

So you need to leave your WiGL receiver at home all day long to be able to charge your mobile phone a tiny bit in the evening. What a great and innovative concept!

[nctnico]

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.