New tech for e-book gizmos? ‘All the battery juice you need directly from the air’
Powercast and low-power displays such E Ink could be a logical match. See CNN/Biz 2.0 for details, as well as Wikipedia item.
March 31st, 2007
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March 31st, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Transmitting power omnidirectionally over the air is highly inefficient. Furthermore, several studies have indicated that even though the heat that radiation of some wavelengths (e.g. microwaves) transfer to human cells don’t do the cells any damage (which is the way almost all related safety standards measure damage) there seems to be something else causing damage to the cells. Maybe some resonating causes disruption to some process inside the cell, I don’t know.
Transferring power by induction works very well with my electric toothbrush, across a distance of a few mm, but I wouldn’t trust it to be safe to have a powercast transmitter at my desk. Also, the “Powercast Safety Whitepaper” is a joke.
For ebook devices based on E Ink I would rather go with solar cells. You need to flood the device with light to be able to read the screen anyway. For devices with illuminated displays I’d rather use batteries (maybe one of those nanotube-capacitor thingies that you can charge in no time flat).
March 31st, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Yes! Solar cells make so much sense. Perhaps we could build the substrata from solar cells and have the entire machine double as a solar power collector.
Now, if we could just find a cost-effective way to let those of us with solar cells to trickle unused power back into the grid, we could begin to make some real contributions.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com