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The Battery-Free Cellphone

battery-free cellphone

University researchers have invented a battery-free cellphone that never needs to be charged.

All our prayers have been answered! A team of researchers at the University of Washington have invented a battery-free cellphone that works without ever needing to be charged. Ever!

The cellphone, which sounds too good to be true, was made of components that you could buy almost anywhere. A battery is not one of the components, but it still uses power.

Since the battery is usually a cellphone’s only source of energy, the engineers working on this project had to find an alternative. It harvests energy, in few microwatts, from ambient radio signals and light.

Don’t believe that’s enough to give it the power it needs to perform the way you want it to? Its capabilities were demonstrated with a Skype call.

It might not look like much at this stage, but keep in mind that it is only a prototype. If a more user friendly, maybe even commercial, version is made, it could be of great benefit to many industries, professions and people.

A detailed paper on how the phone operates was published earlier this month in the journal Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

The phone is so efficient it even takes advantage of tiny vibrations emitted from its microphone or speaker during a call, and then converts then into energy which is used to power the call itself. Welcome to the future, Nikola Tesla is shedding tears of joy in heaven.

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