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| Has anyone seen this - Voltserver: "Digital Electricity" |
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| PlainName:
My quick understanding from the video and stuff, and I'm not an expert, is that they send a pulse of juice followed by some data. The USP is that it's safe power and turns off withing 3ms, which is short enough to not kill you if you touch it. Hence why the power pulse is 1.1ms wide. So, the supply sends a 1.1ms pulse of HV power, some data bits, then waits for the far end to say, "OK, send me more". But this is also supposed to work over thousands of feet and there's a round trip time involved which goes up as the wire goes long. At first I thought this would be a killer since it would slow down the pulses, but I am stuck in data comms mode. Does it really matter if the pulses are taking longer to generate? On the face of it, all that would do is reduce the throughput of power (it would look like PWM, although it isn't really). As the cable gets longer your power capability reduces. Just like resistance, kind of. Actually, 'in addition to resistance'. There would need to be some clever smoothing out of these power pulses, but it's surely doable. On the face of it, calling it digital electricity wouldn't be far off the mark. To anyone with a scope it would look like that and they are effectively packetising the power. Could well be one to keep an eye on. |
| rrinker:
--- Quote from: StillTrying on February 14, 2018, 04:21:57 pm ---"VoltServer Raises $5 Million to Expand Digital Electricity Commercial Deployments VoltServer receives $1M Department of Energy Grant VoltServer closes $2M Series A financing Slater Invests $250k in Energy Management Startup" It doesn't have to produce or have anything. I think I'll develop a new Digtal Light Bulb, with two special Digital Modes, - ON and OFF. :) https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/868253 http://www.google.com/patents/US8068937 --- End quote --- Oh they most definitely have something. The only reason I even heard of it is because one of our clients installed it. The physical devices exist, and it does work. |
| rrinker:
It is most definitely high voltage - the specs on the label for the box at one end say 332-346V DC. Or something like that, I only got a glance at the picture, the low end is > 330V though. It's not trying to shove this over thin twisted pair cable, it uses something that's around 18 gauge. And multiple pairs for redundancy of both signal and power. The client's installation has 3 modules in the source unit, which drives a total of 3 pairs out to the destination. The diagrams and signal graph shown in their patents are not what I expected. This is the power transmisison one: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2016/0134331.html and this is one for another critical piece - the fault detection method, given they are passing > 300VDC. Love the stick figures.. https://patents.google.com/patent/US8781637 |
| StillTrying:
"Oh they most definitely have something. The only reason I even heard of it is because one of our clients installed it. The physical devices exist, and it does work." Does it look like $10m worth of development? If you needed/wanted to semi-remotely power and control some expensive/sensitive equipment. Are we sure that sending it 500Hz 300V pp square waves is the best and much more efficient way than just using a power and data cable? It might "work", but even a stopped watch is correct twice a day. :) I don't get it, are we sure it's not just expensive snake oil? |
| frozenfrogz:
As far as I understand it their selling point is that retrofitting buildings with additional power lines is more cost efficient because you don't need certified electricians and heavy equipment to do the job due to system safety and less regulations but just a technician that runs some 18 gauge twisted pair cables - "as used for security cameras and is cheaply available" (quoted from the vid) - into existing data cable trays. They have some real world examples in the video I posted earlier. However since the audio quality is a little fatiguing I did not watch all of it but skipped through to get a bit of an overview :/ |
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