https://www.ohgizmo.com/2010/01/09/ce...ity-from-wifi/

I thought this might appeal to some of you. Just imagine, you're camping in the yard of some home, church, or business and are able to charge your cellphone from the surrounding wifi signals (whether the signal is encrypted or not!) without having to go inside and ask for an outlet. It's such an innovative idea, I'm sure it could come in handy often!

No it doesn't. Wifi is far too weak to provide charging power.
Read the comments.

fool.

This technology is moving forward. But from a wifi signal?? Hope it works. The only time I stay in one place long enough for such a gadget to charge anything would be at night. And then I'm either in a motel/campground with outlets, or too far in the boonies to catch a signal. Now from a cell tower, that could be very useful.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/busin...04/01/8403349/

Basically, what this thing is is a separate battery that gets charged from the USB port. The Wifi-charging thing, if it works at all, will be useless because it would take a very, very, very long time to charge that way. That is, it's a useless feature.

I'm guessing is that the "wifi charging" stuff is just a publicity stunt.


Wireless recharging would only be practical for very, very short distances. You won't see charghing from a cell tower because the cell tower would have to put out millions of times more power than they already do! And the vast majority of that energy is radiated uselessly (very, very little of that energy is received by devices).

Closest thing I've seen to that is an electrical stream flowing thru an argon stream in the air.Traveled about 10 feet and took 1.2 million volts to pull it off.I think it might take awhile to pull this off because whatever you want to charge is not going to be the shortest path to ground.Would be nice though.

I have a similar unit that does the same thing with solar energy- charges an internal battery with some fan-out solar cells in about 8 hours of direct sunlight, enough to charge a cell phone once. It works, but not efficiently enough to be practical. A Wifi hotspot has a maximum antenna power of 1 watt- think of the illumination of a 1 watt light bulb compared to direct sunlight.

I doubt that this device could capture enough energy to overcome the loss in its own battery. It's a marketing hoax.

"It's dead Jim..."

A total hoax. If the concept was practical why use 1/2 watt wifi signals when commercial tv and radio towers emit 50,000+ watts?

I go camping to get away from high tech. If this worked, it would be more use for charging commuters lighting systems. With the advances in LEDs I dont need to charge my lights more than twice a year.

It doesn't work and it doesn't work better than using a wall socket!

This is a useless statement without more information. How bright is your system? How many hours do you use it?

It appears that a "bright" system (150 lumens) will run for about 1-2 hours on 2 AA batteries.


Here's something fairly bright that will run for 3-6 h that takes 6 h to recharge through USB.

https://www.niterider.com/prod_minewt.shtml

Some folk have used induction coils near high voltage lines to retrieve power from the air. Unfortunately, power companies call this theft of service and prosecute those clever folk.

A wifi transmitter isn't a high voltage power line.

It sure isn't, but power lines are about the only thing around that would have enough "harvestable" energy to be useful. Picowatts of wifi won't do much work.

pigs will fly before this does.

I didn't do my due diligence and now am complicit in RCA's viral marketing. I apologize.

You skeptics are all alike. "It'll never work." "It can't work." "Blah, blah, blah..."

Have you never heard of a flux capacitor? Years ago, it required 1.21 gigawatts of electricity generated by a nuclear reaction to charge. Later advancements allowed charging from a fusion generator powered by garbage. Well, they didn't stop developing it! They now have the charging requirements down to stray WiFi signal levels.

Don't overcharge it, though. You'll go backwards in time.

Personally, I'm waiting for the next version which will harvest energy from sub-space signals. Of course you could just have a cerebral communicator implanted in your head and avoid the nuisance of having to charge a cell phone altogether.

Seriously, has anyone posted on here about charging a cell phone from a dynamo hub?

https://www.peterwhitecycles.com/ewerk.asp
https://www.paddedshorts.co.uk/2009/10/pedal-power/
https://www.tout-terrain.de/2/product...lug/index.html

I tried that. Now my bicycle looks like this. https://static.pagenstecher.de/upload...mc12_front.jpg

What we need is a charger which runs off the motion of the bike!