Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Omg!

Photobucket
RCA Airnergy Charger Harvests Electricity From WiFi Signals

The Airnergy Charger is amazing.

This little box has, inside it, some kind of circuitry that harvests WiFi energy out of the air and converts it into electricity. This has been done before, but the Airnergy is able to harvest electricity with a high enough efficiency to make it practically useful: on the CES floor, they were able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% to full in about 90 minutes, using nothing but ambient WiFi signals as a power source.

The Airnergy has a battery inside it, so you can just carry it around and as long as you’re near some WiFi, it charges itself. Unlike a solar charger, it works at night and you can keep it in your pocket. Of course, proximity to the WiFi source and the number of WiFi sources is important, but at the rate it charges, if you have a home wireless network you could probably just leave anywhere in your house overnight and it would be pretty close to full in the morning.

I think I'll buy 3000 of these...

6 comments:

Steve Bates said...

What will you do when you start getting micro-bills from the thousands of WiFi suppliers whose power you tap? The old guy in me thinks, jeez; it will take a lot of stamps and checks to pay those...

ellroon said...

>:1

Stop bringing reality into my nice little dream of free electricity!...

Watt a sec... is this another low voltage pun?

Steve Bates said...

Not intentionally. FWIW, very casually stated and with a lot of things disregarded,
watts = amps * volts.

joel hanes said...

the physics work out to say that you can recharge a phone only once in a very great while. there just isn't enough electromagnetic flux through this little box to yield much power -- so it doesn't yield much power.

ellroon said...

I don't really know the difference, Steve. I have to relearn it everytime I rewire a lamp or zap myself trying to paint over an outlet.....

ellroon said...

Joel.. I was planning to reroof with the chargers...