Meet the World’s First Battery Free Phone which Extracts Energy from Radio Waves

Meet the World’s First Battery Free Phone which Extracts Energy from Radio Waves. The battery free phone is researched and built by students of University of Washington. This phone can power itself by harvesting energy from radio signals and light. This is indeed an end to chargers.

The team of researchers consisted of computer engineers, achieved their goal by eradicating a a most basic step i.e; converting analogue into digital signals.

Meet the World’s First Battery Free Phone which Extracts Energy from Radio Waves

Shyam Gollakota, associate professor at UW said:

“We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,”

The team has used shelf components on the printed circuit board. The team realized that this prototype was able to perform same functions as basic phone. It was able to transmit speech and receive user input with the button. With this battery free phone, researcher received incoming calls by using Skype and place caller on hold.

Gollakota further added that:

To achieve the really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed

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First Cell Phone that Consume Zero Power

This prototype uses vibrations from microphone when person talking on phone. This motion is converted into analogue radio signal via antenna which are emitted by cellular base station. In this way speech pattern is encoded in reflected radio signals and it uses almost no power.

“The cellphone is the device we depend on most today. So, if there were one device you’d want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cellphone. The proof of concept we’ve developed is exciting today, and we think it could impact everyday devices in the future.”

However this battery free phone require small amount of energy up to 3.5 microwatts. To gain this energy phone gets power from radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away. Using this, the battery free phone can communicate with base station which is 50 feet away.

The researchers plans to improve the phone’s operating system and will encrypt conversations to make them secure.

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