By Evan Ackerman
Remember the Airnergy WiFi power harvester that we showed you last January at CES? You know, the thing that charges your gadgets out of thin air that several commenters pointed out was (mathematically speaking) at best impractical and at worst impossible? Well, it’s now called AirPower, and while RCA still won’t provide details on how it actually manages to pull substantial amounts of electricity out of the air in what seems to be a violation of the first (I think) law of thermodynamics, they have designed some new cases for it.
So, yeah. Looking good. But does it actually work? RCA reiterated that the AirPower will charge itself “with around five to six hours of Wi-Fi exposure” by “regurgitating and converting the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal,” which is the same sort of thing we heard at CES… I really want to believe that RCA wouldn’t keep showing this thing off and making the same impressive claims if they didn’t have a working one in a R&D bunker somewhere, but at the same time, here’s a quote from a commenter on our original article:
“By my calculations, 100% efficiency and absorption at 5 feet away from a 100mW home router, (reasonable figures), it would take 34.5 years to charge that blackberry battery.”
Also, the release date of the AirPower charger has been pushed from this summer to the holidays, and the pricing has gone from $40 to “has yet to be determined.” C’mon RCA, laws of physics be damned, I want this to be real.
VIA [ DVICE ]
Actually it's quite possible to pull energy out of the air. The air temperature that is. These devices gain power via change in air temp. I believe there is some type of diaphragm that expands and contracts based on temp change which in turn creates energy. I don't know all the ins and outs of the system but that's the basic premise.
A Stirling engine, maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
Something similar to this:
http://www.worthpoint.com/blog-entry/lecoultre-…
I like the last one's design. Just change the outside to black and the middle into a dark mahogany. So yea, if it works, this wouldn't be a bad product.
I like the last one's design. Just change the outside to black and the middle into a dark mahogany. So yea, if it works, this wouldn't be a bad product.