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TECH: First Battery-Free Mobile Phone Powered By Radio Signals
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First Battery-Free Mobile Phone

Powered By Radio Signals

By Fanny Bates

BT 201812 tech 01世界首款无电池手机诞生,真正永不断电,再也不怕手机没电了!

永不断电是无数手机依赖者的梦想,为了达到这个目的,华盛顿大学的几个工程师成功发明了一种手机,干脆直接把电池消灭掉,所有电量都来自环境中的无线电波和光线,号称世界上首款“无电池手机”。

现在的科技技术应该还不能造出真正完美的无电池手机,所以这个手机并没有显示屏,看起来就像一个简单的PC电路板。但这个原型机已经进行基本的电话功能,包括传送语音和资料,可以使用Skype接听来电,拨出电话,甚至还有来电等待功能。

它能从无线信号和环境光线中获取能量,即可以从 9.45 米远的基站传输过来的无线电信号中获取能量;也可以是在手机内置了一颗米粒大小的太阳能电池来发电,这能让手机与15.24米外的基站进行通讯。

目前的通话原理是将声音信号转化成手机能理解的数字信号,而这需要消耗大量的能量。所以他们干脆去除这一过程,利用通话过程中麦克风或者扬声器产生的微小震动。然后与这些组件相连的天线,会把这些微小的震动转换成蜂窝基站能够识别并接收的无线电信号,从而把语音信号编码成无线电信号;而在接收语音时能直接把无线电信号交由手机扬声器处理,整个过程基本不消耗电能。

这样当你没有其他能给手机充电的设备或方法时,仍然可以拨出电话。他们说:“这样的电话永远不需要充电,永远可以打电话和发简讯。”

让我们期待科技越来越发达,让我们的生活越来越好,期待有一天能用上不用充电的手机。

BT 201812 Tech 04The battery-free phone can sense speech, actuate the earphones, and switch between uplink and downlink communications, all in real time. It is powered by either ambient radio signals or light.

If there’s a glitch in modern-day smartphone technologies, it’s definitely a phone running out of battery. Mobile phones around the world are performing three basic operations: communicate with the base station., transmit the speech and receive the speech and actuate the speakers. Throughout decades, their role has changed and has become more complex, so keeping your battery life at 100% is really hard to achieve. However, there’s a new, game-changing technology which will significantly reduce the cost of devices and open a path to a completely new generation of battery-free gadgets.
 

Battery-Free Phone - Future Of Mobile Devices

A team of researchers from the University of Washington from Seattle has invented a prototype of the battery-free phone that uses much less power than any other phone in today’s world. The team of scientists and electrical engineers have published their research paper in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, taking a major leap forward to a world without chargers and batteries. They were able to create a device functioning with much less power than any other phone and harvesting those few microwatts of power it requires from the surrounding radio signals and light. So far, this is the most modern mobile transmission of analog signals to digital data.
 

Converting analog signals to digital has been the most difficult and power-consuming process in mobile phones. To eliminate this, the team of scientists has invented a device that can rely on ambient power sources, radio signals and light. Team member Vamsi Talla says the phone picks up small electrical signals known as radio frequency, or RF waves: “Ambient RF waves are all around us. So, as an example, your FM station broadcasts radio waves, your AM stations do that, your TV stations, your cell phone towers. They all are transmitting RF waves.” Built with off-the-shelf materials, the battery-free phone functions like a walky-talky; instead of a screen, it has a small, touch-sensitive number pad. It keeps the signal analog, and to receive a call, the user must wear headphones. “You can either talk or receive at a single point of time,“ says Talla.

BT 201812 Tech 03The research team from the UW Department of Electrical Engineering and the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering includes (left to right): Vamsi Talla, Wu Meiling, Sam Crow, Joshua Smith, Bryce Kellogg and Shyam Gollakota.

Gathering Energy From The Ambient Power

For the phone to gather enough energy, it registers tiny vibrations from the microphone and uses the backscatter technique to transmit signals to a base station. This is a familiar process in physics, used for waves, particles or signals to go back to the original source of energy. So far, it has been widely used in astronomy, photography, and medical ultrasonography. The inspiration to use this type of technique came from one of the team members, whose father served in the army during the Cold War. During that time the Soviet Union bugged a carving of the Great Seal of United States with a device functioning with no battery, before giving it to the American Ambassador as a gift. The latest kind of prototype, believe it or not, gathers radio signals from a base station located at a distance of nine meters.
 

The team also designed a custom base station and, by using Skype, they were able to receive incoming calls as well as dial numbers and place calls on hold. Further on, they have announced that this type of technology could be integrated anywhere, including Wi-Fi routers or standard cellular network. “You could imagine in future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it,” said co-author Vamsi Talla, a former UW electrical engineering doctoral student, and Allen School research associate. “And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere.”

BT 201812 Tech 06Future Challenges

Even though it operates without physical batteries, this battery-free phone still requires a small amount of energy, a power budget of 3.5 microwatts. This amount of energy still isn't enough to perform any sort of operation than making and receiving calls. the conversations are not encrypted and the team is working hard to fix this issue, as well as to add some visual display features. Signal strength weakens with distances and the challenge with too many signals in one base station is yet to be resolved. But the product has a bright future, it has the potential to be extremely affordable to manufacture, even less than a dollar.

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