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If this isn't the smoking gun, it's at least the smoke:
Unlike other locating tags, there is no battery in the iFind tag.
It recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank.
This is the sort of language that never describes an actual technological breakthrough. It's a combination of a description that's too pat, too abstracted, with a feat that is too impressive to go without at least some reference to the actual processes that make it work.
There are chips that allow you to gather and store miniscule amounts of electricity from surrounding RF radiation. Bluetooth LE is also designed to be a very low-power devices, so it is within the realm of possibility for this particular project.
So the LTC3105 [1] looks to be able to supply 0.060 amps at 4 volts. Bluetooth LE [2] seems to use about 0.015 amps at peak (voltage not listed). If I am reading this correctly, it is possible. The question is: what actually runs the circuit connected to the Bluetooth transceiver?
Yeah BLE uses about 12 mA while transmitting or receiving. But it does not do that continuously. Its average power consumption can be under 100 uA very easily.
However, there's no way you'd get even 100 uA by harvesting RF energy in a package that small.
I think the product is very much possible with current tech. I can't tell if the creators know how to do it and just used less technical language or if they have no idea what they're doing. At any rate, there have been way crazier scams on Kickstarter (raman spectroscopy tells me nutrition info etc).
Didn't Kickstarter ban showing mock up or rendered hardware as substitution for the real thing? Maybe that's all this is?
Your first cite link is wrong. Despite that, looking up the LTC3105, it is a maximum power point tracker, meaning that it is for DC power sources, not AC ones like RF. It also requires a minimum working voltage of 225mV, which is much higher than that generated by RF, especially with such a tiny antenna.
Not really. There's nothing fundamentally interesting or new here. It's the same principle as a crystal radio, but somewhat more complex since they're claiming to store power over time and then use it in bursts.
The real problem here is simply that their claimed power budget can't be covered by the RF emissions they say that it uses. But the idea is reasonably sound even if their implementation may not be.
Interesting. I bought some of the Tiles (link below), and they are basically the same thing, except they have a 1-year battery and are a bit thicker. They work fine.
Regardless of all of the technical arguments about RFID range, the idea behind this product is that it beeps, so you don't need fancy locating equipment.
I don't know of any passive RFID tags with enough left-over power to run a loud beeper.
You would need a strongly directional antenna and user input (or an antenna array) to find the tag using the phone itself, which would be a relatively bulky and expensive piece of equipment.
If you're just trying to find something using radio, a 100% passive system like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECCO is simpler and cheaper anyway.
I'm not sure why they say these are RFID-enabled; all the tags they show are BTLE. The difference being that BTLE devices are active transmitters (they have a battery), and RFID tags are passive, having their energy provided via radio waves or magnetic coupling.
The problem with RFID is that past a few feet, you need a lot of energy to power them (it falls off with the inverse-square law), which your phone just won't (and shouldn't) put out. So RFID is dead in the water for this sort of thing, but BTLE solutions abound and are quite cheap, despite that they need to have a battery.
IIRC RFID actually falls off with R^4 because the power gets transmitted to the RFID tag and then it's reduced by the same factor again when it transmits back.
The power is obviously lost on the way back, but this doesn't actually factor into the distance you can read from, practically speaking. If you can get power to the device, you can use a super high-gain antenna to receive its transmission. Same thing goes with NFC chips; the one I have implanted can only be powered feasibly from about 10 inches away (physically impossible beyond about half a meter, due to flesh and the fact that it's magnetic coupling), but if something else powers it, you can read it from an exceptionally large distance.
Well, yeah, by the same logic you could could power it with a high gain antenna as well and boost your distance. The falloff is still 1/R^4 without a third power source, you've just multiplied it by a constant.
The limiting factor is (afaik) getting enough energy into the tag to run its components. If you were working with much higher distances and powers then the transmission strength of the tag might matter, but in this case it's basically a one-way transmission problem.
RFID is basically an application of radar, and as such suffers from an inverse fourth power dropoff with range. Radio is inverse square, but when you reflect it off something, you suffer that inverse square twice. So while doubling the range drops your received radio power by a factor of 4, it drops your received RFID response power by a factor of 16. To have more than a tiny range, you need a lot of transmitting power and a really good receiver.
Why wouldn't people just use RFID tags? They're cheap and batteryless. You could slip one in your phone's battery cover to locate it (or tape it on) and the locator could be a 'dumb' brick of plastic and a tiny circuit with a 9V battery that's mated to the tags.
Passive RFID tags can't beep, so the locator would need to either use multiple antennas and fun algorithms (indoor location is pretty hard, especially if your device is small and the antennas are close together) or a highly directional antenna and user antenna-waving input.
The nice part about beeping locating tags (for those without hearing disabilities, of course) is that rather than using complex RF approaches to location, they just make noise and let the human do something they're already good at: locate a sound.
RFID doesn't work at large ranges. You would basically have to be holding the RFID reader with 10cm of the object you are trying to find to actually get a signal.
This is a message one of the backers received (according to the comments):
Hello,
This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team.
We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled.
A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include:
• A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
• Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
• Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
• Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners
Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part.
We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules.
As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message.
There was a bunch of news articles about the fact their product is almost certainly being impossible, and Kickstarter presumably decided they didn't want the bad press. (Merely violating the laws of physics isn't enough for them to take action.)
There's a lot of skepticism whether their product is in-any-way feasible. The concern is that they're raising money without a technically-viable product.
Seems there's a bit more to it than just that. They claimed that they had pending patents when they don't (or at least, the patent numbers they gave are bunk), their demo video had bluetooth turned off, and some other nasty things. It seems to me that if they do have a legitimate product, they sure picked a bad way to show that.
To future readers, the title used to say "SUSPENDED: iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag". Unfortunately, the title was changed, removing all of the context of its posting. Just another reason the automated title changers need to be reëvaluated.
I don't understand why HN still has a field for manually entering titles if the system is capable of scraping it from the linked site, and does it automatically within a few minutes of posting.
Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety Rules Community Guidelines Terms of Use