BATTERY-FREE CELL PHONES


BATTERY-FREE CELL PHONES

Imagine never having to charge your smart phone ever again. We may be one step close to that battery-free future thanks to new research from University of Washington engineers. They made a phone capable of calling people using energy from light anf ambient radio signals. Associate professor Shyam Gollakota said it could be the "first functioning cell phone that consumes almost zero power."
No,  it's not magic-the university of Washington's battery-free cellphone can function on just a few micro-watts of power it harvests from RF signals coming from a base station around 31 feet away,  or from light via a minute solar cell that's about the size of a grain of a rice. The tean constructed their prototype from off the shelf components abd have used it to make skype calls.
The cell phone prototype is able to run on such low power in part because the team got rid of the step to convert analogue signals into digital data-a process that sucks up a lot of power in modern cellphone. Their battery-free cellphone can make use of small vibrations from the speaker or microphone that come when a person is talking or listening while making a call.
According to a university press release, "An antenna connected to those components converts that motion into changes in standard analogue radio signal emited by a cellular base station. This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that almost uses no power. "
The team designed their own base station to recieve and transmit radio signals. But that technology could be embedded in cell towers or even Wi-Fi routers in the future. Research associate Vamsi Talla said if every home has a router-as many already do- "you could get battery-free cellphone coverage every where. "
The research was recently published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies.

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