Building a laser to power your phone
( This is a draft. )
After going to San Francisco for a weekend to attend the buildspace IRL event, I was inspired to continue working on the browser extension. But, deep down, I thought to myself - do I really want to spend my time on this? On one hand, I want to finish the projects that I start, but on the other, just thinking about sitting there and coding a browser extension is not fun for me. So, I cut my losses and started day dreaming once again. I think this is the best way to get an original idea. Just do nothing and be bored for a bit and see how much fun stuff you can come up with.
I have a lot of devices for an average person. I have an iphone, ipad, apple watch, macbook, ps4, whoop band and airpods. All of these devices need to be charged on a regular basis. What makes it worse is that sometimes they have different charging standards and requirements. I am a huge fan of the EU rooting for the USB C to be adopted as the single standard for charging. With a single standard, you dont need 5 types of chargers and adapters. You can just plug in your device and it will charge. Yes, you might have some reservations about whether the government should dictate what the standard is when technology is so rapidly advancing. But, for now its a good thing.
Still, I am not a fan of the fact that I have to individually charge my devices and then remember to do so on a regular basis. What if I forget to charge my airpods or my apple watch. Their batteries are so small that if not charged regularly, they will die. In an ideal world, I would not even have a charger and then my devices would magically charge themselves. We dont live in that world yet. But what if we did?
I kept thinking about how this problem, if it could be solved, might impact your everyday life. There are many ways to go about solving this problem. First, you could just fill your house with charging surfaces. This might work. You buy like 10 charging surfaces and keep them in your kitchen, living room, bedroom and so on. So I looked into this. There are many options for charging surfaces. You could have a single device pad you can keep near your bedstand. There are also mult-device pads with a slot for each charger. Apple tried to make a charging pad that would work with devices irrespective of the orientation. They were nto successful. But Tesla was able to make one and its pretty cool.
The more scientific term for what I just described is inductive charging. Firstly there is a surface that has a coil of wires in the shape of a circle. Electrictiy flow through the wires in a alternating fashion. The moving electric charge, as found by Oersted in 1820, creates a electromagnetic field which gets amplified by the coil and is directed through the center of the wires. Here is the crazy thing, if you have another coil on your phone or other device, the alternating field will move the electrons in the other coil. This alternating current in the new coil will need to be converted to direct current which can then charge the battery of your phone.
So, whats up with this technology? Why can we just charge our devices using inductive charging? Lets do a thought experiment, lets put a lot of power through the coil. When you put a lot of current in a wire, the electrons start colliding with the atoms in the wire and heat up the coil. The more and more you think about things in the sense of energy and waves and fields, the more you realize that you have only scratched the surface of what reality is.