Engineers at the University Of Washington have developed a technology called Power Over Wi-Fi(PoWiFi), Which can transmit both energy and internet from one router. We are surrounded by Wi-Fi almost everywhere, but have we explored the potential of Wi-Fi to its full depth?
Talking about their newly developed system, Vamsi Talla, an Electrical engineer from the team said, “For the first time we’ve shown that you can use Wi-Fi devices to power the sensors in cameras and other devices. We also made a system that can co-exist as a Wi-Fi router and a power source, it doesn’t degrade the quality of your Wi-Fi signals while it’s powering devices.”
The technology was first announced in 2015 and is projected to be represented at Association for Computing Machinery’s CoNEXT 2015 conference in Germany. This technology could grab a lot of attention.
At persent the transfer is low energy which causes no harm to health. During the research, engineers found that the Wi-Fi signal is sufficient to charge low-power gadgets like Fitness Bands or Cameras. The way Wi-Fi sends out signals in all directions causes a large energy loss.
In their experiment researchers showed that PoWiFi router can transmit enough power wirelessly that can charge a wearable Up24 fitness tracker from 0% to 41% in 2.5 hours and it charged a VGA camera from 5 meters. They also tested the regular Internet access performance of the routers, which was found to be unaltered. They observed no additional lagging in browsing or streaming content.
Of course this small amount of energy transmission can’t compete with wired power transmission. But in future, with better signal refinement and technological improvements, we could achieve much higher levels of energy transfer wirelessly.