RCA Airnergy Charger
RCA has sent in images of their latest project, the Airnergy Charger. It is dubbed as a ‘Wi-Fi Hotspot Power Harvester’, which directly shows us how the device works. Yep, you’ve guessed right, Airnergy Charger ‘harvests’ Wi-Fi signals in the air, converts them into electricity and stores the energy in its own lithium battery. Moreover, even though the users are not on line, the device could also harvest Wi-Fi energy as long as they’re within the signal area. And you could never imagine what a huge amount of energy the Airnergy Charger could produce, as claimed by the company, the energy converted from merely one strong signal could charge a Blackberry from 30% to full in less than 2 hours. Surprisingly powerful!
To ensure the amazing product could benefit everybody, the company would launch it this summer for merely $40.
Designer: RCA
February 27th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
get an apartment, rig up about 400 of these and rig them up to power your house cuz in an apartment complex there’s always tons of loose wifi signals ripe for harvest
June 5th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Why can’t this be incorporated into cellphones now?
June 9th, 2010 at 1:08 am
“Why can’t this be incorporated into cellphones now?”
Probably because it would make them too bulky, too heavy, and too expensive.
June 15th, 2010 at 7:08 pm
re: that guy’s comment,
Yeah, but buying 400 at $40 a pop you’re talking 16 grand to rig up your apartment like that. It’s gonna take a while to recoup that much in energy savings.
June 25th, 2010 at 12:42 am
I need to rewire my cell charger to accept mini pda for one of these things. Great invention.
July 22nd, 2010 at 6:23 am
They will charge so slowly that it will be useful only for lower power applications. Such as a mobile phone.
Wiring up 400 for your home is not going to achieve much. Not unless you have 400 wifi hotspots very close to you in which case you should consider moving
September 29th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
“Why can’t this be incorporated into cellphones now?”
It probably can but cell phone companies wouldn’t want that. Think about how much money they make on adapters for charging right now. They’d lose money if they switched to this.
And besides won’t a lot of these in the market hog up so much Wi-fi energy that it will cut down on the signal for the devices that use Wi-Fi?
December 22nd, 2010 at 8:57 pm
LIES LIES LIES YEAH!
July 22nd, 2011 at 3:11 am
If you think wifi at starbucks sucks now. wait till everyone there has one of these. the energy doesn’t come from nowhere. there is only so much of it in the wifi signals. each one of these devices cuts the signal strength of the router. given enough of these, you would have to be right up on the router to get a signal
October 3rd, 2011 at 10:21 am
This seems heavily suspicious, the average router only puts out around 100 milliwatts (mine is 72mw so this is being optomistic), and remember that wifi is typically broadcasted in an omnidirectional fashion so power drops quickly the futher away you are away from the source. Ergo, you wouldn’t have 100mw’s of wifi power targeting this device like a laser beam, you would only have a small percentage of that.
The circuitry needed to step up any harvested power to charge it’s own internal Li-Ion battery also has it’s efficency losses, even if it ‘did’ work and with a trucklode of wifi access points around you, you would be looking at months if not longer to charge a BlackBerry device up even if it was turned off, in fact, I doubt it could barely keep up with the self-discharge rate of most batteries..
I’ll remain skeptical until proven otherwise
November 13th, 2011 at 12:22 am
i’ve made a similar device in 2002, it uses a basic crystal radio circuit to charge battery. copper windings are used to cause electron flow and capacitor is for increase. diod forces electron direction. basicaly, instead of using a speaker, it’s charging a battery. wire length is voltage and surface area of wire is amperage. tune wire length to wifi freq. and you have a wifi trickle charger. (mine was tuned to the radio freq. earth creates)