Originally published at: This entire living room is a wireless charger | Boing Boing
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“We’re not saying blanketly that this technology is safe under all uses—we’re still exploring”
Appropriate disclaimer, otherwise jokes. 
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If you don’t mind your cards with magstripes being wiped and pacemaker going wonky.
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And it will be a bloody disaster for energy efficiency.
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Some folks already have whole-house Qi charging.
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Why not have one that you can see, so you can tell it’s charging?
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In case there is confusion about how wireless charging works (which there seems to be based on this thread) it is just radio waves. Same as are already pouring through your house and body right now, all the time. What these researchers have done is found a way to get that radio source close to everything in a room near to things that might need charging because the inverse square law is a cruel mistress. So, the floor charges the lamp, the wall charges the phone on the credenza, etc.
No it will not erase your credit cards or affect pacemakers any more than Classic Rock 92.1 FM The Crush does right now.
The efficiency concerns raised are the real ones. Wireless charging is wickedly inefficient and if we moved everything over to it tomorrow, it would be a substantial carbon waste.
None of this will stop people from freaking out, of course. People still think cellphones cause cancer and all sorts of other RF-related nonsense.
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From the father of wireless…
N. Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.
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Well, electromagnetic fields. They’re near-field rather than far-field devices though, so they don’t necessarily launch significant amounts of energy into space never to return.
The efficiency is a cost tradeoff. If the source is high-Q parallel resonant and the load is moderately low-loss, well and good. However, the good load properties come at the price of mass and (relatively) exotic materials and the source at copper and low-hysteresis ferromagnetic cores such as soft iron – which tend to be massive, expensive, or both.
On top of the points above, the Qi standard provides a mechanism for the source to detect a compliant load and shut off all other power use when there isn’t any. That might be rather more difficult in the room-sized version.
In the end, the source/load pair is just a transformer, and transformers are some of the most efficient devices around.
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and that guy’s nuts are poached
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The thing I wonder about are unintentional receivers. Metal rings that pick up eddys and turn it into electricity that just runs around in circles will cause the metal to heat up. Nipple rings that turn into spark gaps. A never ending list of hilarity!
The reason these problems don’t occur with Qi chargers is that the phones and other wirelessly charged devices have NFC chips in them that talk to the chargers and say “OK, I’m close enough, turn on and charge me.”
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No. Hazardous from the get-go, good grief! This is some hack’s idea of stirring the proverbial ant pile and waiting to see what is stirred up. The idea of another unnecessary technological intrusion into to our lives - and this one intimately into our bodies and living spaces - can only bring harm to our health.
Nope. We have to be smarter than our devices, folks.
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I rewatched it a few months ago. Bruno Lawrence was awesome.
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You know what will protect you from all those radio waves? The COVID vaccine. Fact. /s
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I do wonder if anybody has actually tested their safety for people who have pacemakers.
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