Wireless Charging is Hard

Apple announced that they weren’t coming out with their wireless charging mat for devices as announced.  I was an angel investor in a Chicago company, NuCurrent, that is the industry leader in wireless charging.  It’s super technical, and it is super hard.

NuCurrent has many Ph.D. electrical engineers working daily on the problem.  NuCurrent has a patent portfolio that is second to none.

Their CEO Jacob Babcock recently wrote a post on their blog about Apple Power. Here is an excerpt of what he wrote.  Click over and read the whole thing.

Apple’s AirPower product was an ambitious concept that took on multiple, overlapping technical challenges related to wireless power. These included:

Variable loading
Having from one to three devices charging simultaneously

Variable charging rates
Supporting devices with different power requirements (ie. Watches and AirPods need less power than iPhones)

Variable receiver sizes
Supporting Watches, AirPods and iPhones, all of which have different receiver antenna sizes

Industrial design standards
Apple’s stringent industrial design standards often constrain product height/thickness specifications

When you combine these factors, you get a very complex engineering problem that causes the following performance issues:

• Excess heat
• Faulty communications between the transmitter and receivers
• Switching complexity
• Dead spots over a large portion of the charge area
• Manufacturing complexity

Recently, I bought an iPhone that charges wirelessly. I also have a bedside lamp that has a wireless charging pad built into it. It’s not 100% reliable. Sometimes if I don’t set the phone down just right, I don’t get a charge at all.

When we did diligence on NuCurrent, we looked really hard at the technology.  There were others out there like Ubeam already attacking the problem but in a different way.  They were supposedly using Ultrasound via the air but one of their employees said the technology wasn’t there. Diligence on these kinds of things is really hard because a lot of the stuff is pie in the sky and futuristic.  There is an element of hope that this sort of tech can scale off the small kernel of technology that is already built and provable.

NuCurrent tech is there and it is ready for prime time.  I can envision a day where NuCurrent technology is built into things like drywall.  You could put in thermostats and plugs and not have to wire for them.  You could move them when you wanted to without rewiring.  Just think of the billions of dollars saved in construction and rehab costs.

Check out NuCurrent’s Twitter feed to see what they can wirelessly charge today.