Hi! ... as in "over the air"... This is REALLY cool! A radio transmitter provides power to a remote device. Can this be the Holy Grail that will finally free us from cleaning track? http://money.cnn.com/magazines/busi...4/01/8403349/index.htm?postversion=2007033007
LOL. Me too. I nominate the inventor as the real "wizard of Menlo Park." Can you tell I've been crawling around under the layout most of the day? Ben
Better than laying on your back under your layout soldering wires and having hot solder droplets hit and roll off your chest. Actually, I am at work in the office right now. I am intrigued by the concept. I am teetering right now between going DCC for my expansion or staying with DC until there are drop ins for my engines and it is in a language I can understand and use. Sooner or later, a new technology will come along and make DCC either a lot easier to install or make it obsolete.
I hope this is not Melanie Haiken's April Fool's joke. And I didn't see railroad models in "World's 11 coolest products." Go figure. Ben
I don't know if this is for real, or merely an April Fool. (When I forwarded the page to my son, its title was shown as "April 1, 2007".) However, I do know that Nikolai Tesla played with this idea about 80 years ago as a way to distribute massive amounts of commercial electric power. Nothing ever came of that venture because the hardware it required was so massive. But now that we have micro-miniaturization, the only limit may be our imaginations.....neat concept!
"...The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device's battery at a distance of up to 3 feet. .." Well if true I am glad I model the Pennsy. Might just put that trainphone antenna to work. And isn't this basically how the trainphone antenna did work? It picked up signals from wires struck trackside and converted it in vocal sounds. Very limited in range as is this.
No way. The amount of juice required would generate too much heat. I'm not an engineer but something tells me we would have heard of this application being used for other purposes with a mass market.
Holy cow Batman! It's real! http://www.powercastco.com/ Note the entry "Games/Toys", which we do fit under (although we hate to admit it! :teeth: ) They won "Best of Show" at the CES! http://www.powercastco.com/press/PowercastBestOfShow.pdf
I think Nikola Tesla came up with some similiar concept in 1893 and continued his work until shortly after turn of the century. I am still waiting for his dream of free electricity for the entire world. My question is how does this process not shock you? I certainly hope they never come up with a wireless way of running your deep freeze at 220V. Mr X
Trainphones worked for about a hundred feet... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainphone ... but not under wires... :thumbs_down:
"Thanks to the fact that it transmits only safe low wattages, " "Could Powercast's technology also work for larger devices? Perhaps, but not quite yet. Laptop computers, for example, use more than 10 times the wattage of Powercast transmissions. " Hmmmm, I guess we need micro powered motors in our trains, 1000% efficiency should get us there (or not). Actually!!!! this does present hope for my 1:400 HN- scale layout (HN being half N or 1:320, the minus indicating even smaller <GGG>). I guess this depends on my being immortal (I haven't died yet, so it is possible), cause I think it will be a looong time before it will affect our hobby. On a more positive note, anything that will run all those battery powered clocks and eliminate renting a 16' ladder to replace a battery in smoke detector can't be all bad. P=I**2 x R still holds. Bob in IDaho, who at 66, remembers getting ice delivered
Actually, don't our N scale locos only require about 10 watts on average? Or have I messed up the math? That's less than a 10th of what a laptop computer requires. I can't find any info on what the specs are on these devices. But they are marketing it as good for things like ipods, which apparently consume about the same power. I think the biggest hurdle would be finding space inside the loco for the batteries.
Ben, your locos may have a slight problem.....? Most N-Scale locos of the latest designs draw less than 0.25 Amps at 12 Volts, equating to less than 3 Watts. Now I'm going to let my ancient brain wander a bit.....:angel: Let's say the RF receiver can be packaged to the same size as a DCC controller, and a LiMH battery can be formed to the same shape as a body casting weight. LiMH has about the same density as lead, and a battery the size of a body weight would have one helluva lot of stored energy.mg: So, now we convince some forward thinking model manufacturer that there's Gold in Them Thar Hills! And don't tell his accountants what he's doing!:zip:
