ROTM
Obviously.
Bored of being associated with delivering milliamps for trickle-charging gadgets, wireless-power company Fulton has decided to show its muscle by equipping a kitchen blender with its wireless technology. Wireless power has been possible for a long time: most electric toothbrushes are recharged that way, but delivering a decent …
I may just be a bit jaded, but did anyone else notice a possibility of this thing being fake? Battery operated is one thing, but since the video has a scene cut in it before they actually start the blender, they may be using just a corded blender with the cord placed behind the blender and not showing.
Take note from David Copperfield, continuous shots or I'm not buying it. :)
On the one hand, this is superbly nifty. It enables cable-free surfaces and eliminates all sorts of related problems, especially with spillage and such. There is also a safety bonus, as say something falling over will automatically turn off. On the other hand it is vastly limiting. Your stuff has to be placed on the "enabled area", it will not work elsewhere unless it also comes with a plug. And that "enabled area" will still have to be plugged into the wall.
I @#!$! hate, loathe, abhor, & despise cables. (Been working with computers and their requisite nest of wires too long I suppose) If they can get this to where I can have it in my floor or wall and just position stuff in the general vicinity of it - I'd be in heaven... well, assuming that the associated magnetic fields don't lead to some sort of horrible mutations...
Can they embed the access point technology into work surfaces?
I can imagine that if you kitchen worktops, or the surface of your desk acted like an access point then this could be a real improvement.
On the other hand, I'm really not sure how a one size fits all supply could work from everything from milli-watt devices (Mobile phones?), to mega-watt devices (Microwave oven?). For heaven sake, we can't even standardise the power requirements of laptops, at the moment every one requres a different power brick.
Sure wires are a pain in the ass, but just having one cable regardless of the device that we want to connect would give us 75% of the benefits without having to worry about extra radiation/safety concerns...
.. anything at all about electricity knows that wireless power fall into the Bloody Stupid category.
Wireless recharging of toothbrushes is one thing, it is done on a docking station and is basically a very lossy transformer. The second you put any distance between transmitter and receiver the efficiency drops by several orders of magnitude. Just think, radio and TV transmitters manage to transmit kW rating but the receivers get only femtowatts. All the rest is used to heat up the atmosphere and surfaces in general. The power does not go from A to B at all.
And there is another point. Many people are campaigning against phone masts, power lines, power transformers, wireless IT in schools etc. They insist that it causes all sorts of ailments from cancer to loss of sleep. And here we are developing yet more broadcasting. How stupid is that?
Then there is another thing. My phone tells me to unplug the charger once it is charged to save energy. This new technology is soooo inefficient and is not turned off when the charging is complete. All because some bug**rs are too idle to use a plug. And we are now going to reduce our carbon footprint to 20% of current level. Someone is having a laugh.
Just because it can be done does not mean that we should do it