Coils In The Road Could Charge EVs While Driving

August 17, 2022 by Lewin Day 131 Comments

One of the primary issues with EVs is that you need to pull over and stop to get a charge. If there isn’t a high-speed DC charger available, this can mean waiting for hours while your battery tops up.

It’s been the major bugbear of electric vehicles since they started hitting the road in real numbers. However, a new wireless charging setup could allow you to juice up on the go.

Electric Highways

Over the years, many proposals have been made to power or charge electric vehicles as they drive down the road. Many are similar to the way we commonly charge phones these days, using inductive power transfer via magnetic coils. The theory is simple. Power is delivered to coils in the roadway, and then picked up via induction by a coil on the moving vehicle.

Taking these ideas from concept into reality is difficult, though. When it comes to charging an electric vehicle, huge power levels are required, in the range of tens to hundreds of kilowatts. And, while a phone can sit neatly on top of a charging pad, EVs typically require a fair bit of ground clearance for safely navigating the road. Plus, since cars move at quite a rapid pace, an inductive charging system that could handle this dynamic condition would require huge numbers of coils buried repeatedly into the road bed. Continue reading “Coils In The Road Could Charge EVs While Driving” →

Custom Coil Lets Mouse Charge Without Wires

January 13, 2021 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

It’s 2021, shouldn’t all of our devices be able to pull the power they need from the ether? [Sasa Karanovic] certainly thinks so, which is why he recently took it upon himself to add wireless charging capabilities to his desktop computer peripherals. The Qi transmitter and receiver modules are relatively cheap and easy to come by, the trick is in getting them installed.

The keyboard gets non-invasive Qi charging.

For the keyboard, [Sasa] took the path of least resistance. The receiver coil lives inside a little 3D printed box attached to the back, and power is routed through a hacked up right-angle USB cable. It’s a simple addition that doesn’t make any permanent changes to the keyboard; perfect for those who don’t want to risk toasting their gear.

But that wasn’t really an option for the mouse. Obviously the Qi hardware would have to go on the inside, but at a glance it was clear there wasn’t enough room to mount the stock coil. So [Sasa] pulled the original coil apart and rewound it around a small 3D printed jig. This resulting coil was perfectly sized to fit inside the flat area on the left side of the mouse with no apparent degradation in charging ability. Wiring the module up to an unpopulated pad on the PCB allowed him to easily inject the 5 V output into the device’s existing charging circuitry.

We’ve seen plenty of aftermarket Qi charging coils take up permanent residence in various gadgets, but rewinding the coil is a neat trick that we’ve only seen pulled off a couple times in the past. Something to file away mentally should you ever want to wirelessly power up one of your projects.

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Projector And NES Mini Hide Out Inside The Real Thing

November 5, 2019 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Taking a page out of the Xzibit Engineering Handbook, [Geeksmithing] recently decided that the gutted carcass of an original Nintendo Entertainment System would make a perfect home for…a smaller NES. Well, that and two wireless controllers. Plus a projector. Oh, and batteries so it can be used on the go. Because really, at that point, why not?

The video after the break starts with a cleverly edited version of a legitimate NES commercial from the gaming glory days of the 1980s, and segues into an rundown of all the modern hardware [Geeksmithing] crammed into the case of this legendary console. It helps that the official NES Classic used for the project is so much smaller than its more than thirty year old predecessor, leaving plenty of room inside to get creative. We particularly like the dual wireless controllers which are conveniently hiding inside the original cartridge slot.

Frankly, that alone would have made this project worthwhile in our book, but [Geeksmithing] didn’t stop there. He also added in a pico projector that’s normally covered up by the black facia on the rear of the console, complete with a “kickstand” to tip the system up to the appropriate angle. Continuing with the theme of enabling ad-hoc NES play sessions, he also packed in enough batteries to keep the system running for a respectable amount of time. There’s even put an inductive charging coil in the bottom of the system so he can top off the batteries just by dropping the system on a modified SNES mousepad.

Last time [Geeksmithing] checked in, he was embedding a Raspberry Pi into a Super Mario Thwomp that was made from real concrete. We can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

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Electronic Candle Charges Inductively

June 28, 2019 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

Humans like things that look like other things. A great example are faux LED tea light candles, with a plastic “flame” and flickering orange LED to recreate the effect of their waxy brethren. [gzumwalt] wanted to take the concept a little further, however, and got down to work.

The design harvests the orange LED and flame lens from an existing LED candle, but the rest is all original. [gzumwalt] printed a full-size candle, and fitted it with inductive charging hardware and a lithium-polymer battery. A corresponding charging base is used to supply power to the candle when it’s not in use. This is all handled automatically, with neodymium magnets used to activate reed switches to turn the charger on and the LED off.

It’s a tidy build that can be easily replicated with a 3D printer and some off-the-shelf parts. It’s also less wasteful than using disposable batteries, and safer than using real candles – so if you find yourself routinely shooting candle scenes in your budget film studio, it might be worth printing up a set of these.

LED candles range from the basic to the extreme – we’ve seen builds so realistic, you can light them with a match.

You Can Add Wireless Charging To IPhone… Kinda

August 26, 2018 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We could watch cellphone teardown videos all day long. There’s something pleasing about seeing how everything is packed into such a small enclosure. From the connectors, to that insidious glue, to the minuscule screws, [Scotty Allen] has a real knack for giving us a great look at the teardown process. Take a look at his latest video which attempts to add wireless charging to an iPhone. I think there’s a lot to be said for superb lighting and a formidable camera, but part of this is framing the shots just right.

Now of course we’ve taken apart our fair share of phones and there’s always that queasy “I think I’m going to break something” feeling while doing it. It’s reassuring that [Scotty] isn’t able to do things perfectly either (although he has the benefit of walking the markets for quick replacement parts). This video is a pretty honest recounting of many things going wrong.

The iPhone 6 and 7 are not meant to have wireless charging, but [Scotty’s] working with a friend named [Yeke] who created an aftermarket kit for this. The flexible PCB needs to be folded just right, and adhesive foam added (along with a magical incantation) to make it work. That’s because the add-on is a no-solder job. Above you can see it cleverly encircles one of the mating connectors and relies on mechanical pressure to make contact with the legs of that connector. Neat!

In the second half of the video [Scotty] meets up with [Yeke] to discuss the design itself. We find it interesting that [Yeke] considers his work a DIY item. Perhaps it’s merely lost in translation, but perhaps [Yeke’s] proximity to multiple flexible PCB manufacturers makes him feel that this is more like playing around for fun than product design. Any way you look at it, the ability to design something that will fit inside that crazy-tight iPhone case is both impressive and mesmerizing. Having seen some of the inductive charging hacks over the years, this is by far the cleanest way to go about it.

We caught up with [Scotty] during last year’s Supercon. We may not be able to drop everything and move to Shenzhen, but hearing about the experience is just enough to keep us wanting to!

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Wirelessly Charge Your Phone From High Voltage Power Lines

April 10, 2017 by Jack Laidlaw 103 Comments

Using nothing more than an antenna, a spark plug, a flyback transformer, a diode, and a car phone charger, [Kreosan] have implemented the world’s most dangerous cell-phone charger: wirelessly charging their phone from high voltage power lines. This is a demonstration of a hack that we thought was just an urban legend, but it’s probably best to leave this as just a demo — this one is probably illegal and definitely dangerous.

The charger works by holding an old TV aerial fairly close to high voltage overhead cables, and passing the resulting tiny current through a spark plug and a flyback transformer to ground. To charge the phone, they tapped the transformer, rectified it through a diode, and fed it into a car-plug phone charger. [Kreosan] claims to harvest enough “free” electricity to charge the phone. (Where by “free”, we mean stolen from the electric grid.)

If you regularly find yourself running out of charge and like a bit of danger why not make a power bank that looks like a bomb instead. Sure we don’t advise you take it on a plane but it seems like a much safer option than using overhead power lines.

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More Lights For Your Presents

December 25, 2013 by Marsh 1 Comment

presLights

Lights on the tree? Check. Presents under the tree? Check. Lights in the presents? Why not! If your gifts don’t look festive enough and you have a spare inductive charging system lying around the house—though, you could always build your own from scratch—you can brighten things up by installing a few LEDs in the packaging.

The Instructable takes advantage of those new-fangled LED Christmas lights, one strand of which typically draws under 1A and requires around 5V, putting it in the ballpark for popular induction systems used to charge cell phones such as the Powermat. In this particular example, the strand ran off 3 AA batteries, or 4.5V, which meant stepping down the voltage either with a power regulator or, more conveniently, a simple diode in series.

Some additional modifications to the packaging tidy up the installation, including carving out some of the cardboard to recess the receiver and securing everything with hot glue before wrapping it all in paper. You can see a quick demonstration video below.

Continue reading “More Lights For Your Presents” →