BendiNewsTest: Wi-Fi-powered electronics make Nikola Tesla’s dream a reality

Click here to view the embedded video.

What if you could power your iPhone from thin air? Making wires redundant was one of Nikola Tesla’s biggest dreams – a dream University of Washington researchers want to fulfill with PoWiFi. Shyam Gollakota and his team recently demonstrated technology at EmTech Digital in San Francisco that harvests ambient ‘backscatter’ radio signals to power battery-free temperature and camera sensors. The technology can also be used to charge nickel–metal hydride and lithium-ion coin-cell batteries at distances of up to 28 feet. In a recent paper describing their work, called Powering the Next Billion Devices with Wi-Fi, the researchers provide a detailed description of how they successfully powered devices over WiFi using existing Wi-Fi chipsets–without reducing the router’s performance. Details after the jump.