WiTricity-Know The Wireless Electricity

Perhaps you know what WiFi is?? Keeping the same thing in mind, wireless electricity has been named WiTricity by Team of Research scientist in MIT who demonstrated wireless electricity by lighting a 60W light bulb kept 2 meters away from the source of electricity. How did they do it?? Let’s find out.

It was Nikola Tesla in late 1800 who first proposed wireless electricity but he was not entirely successful. Later some other scientist tried to modify Tesla’s experimentation of Wireless electricity but in vain. What they did was based on how transformers work today i.e. mutual induction. They worked on two coils, one primary and the other secondary. Current in the first coil induces a magnetic field, this magnetic field couples with the secondary coil to give an output current. But this has many disadvantages. First, the coil needs  to be kept very close to each other, if the secondary coil is taken far from the output then current lags in magnitude to a huge extent compared to primary. To compensate the current loss the intensity of magnetic field can be made stronger at primary by introducing more round of coils but this would waste a huge amount of magnetic field and hence energy since only a part of primary coil’s magnetic field will be coupled. Thus mere mutual induction can’t be used to transmit electricity due to huge inefficiency.

The WiTricity Team and at right an mutual inductive charger

WiTricity uses the similar concept like above but with added resonance to it. The primary coil is made to vibrate at a particular frequency (its resonance frequency); if this frequency matches with the secondary coil’s frequency then transfer of electricity with power loss can be obtained. Thus both the coil must have that much of current with the same resonate frequency. Added resonance changes the construction of the coil to some extent as well. The coil is throughout inductive with capacitive plates at its ends to store the charges, this is how the WiTricity team lit a 60W bulb wirelessly.

WiTricity Demonstartion,

Future Home using Electricity, Source: HowStuffWorks

David Criswell of the University of Houston proposed use of microwave to transfer electricity. He also tells that Solar cell station can be constructed at the Moon from where electricity will be directed to earth via microwave band of spectrum but again the question of maintenance of the solar cell at Moon is questionable. Furthermore microwave may also have health hazards.

NASA also proposed the use of infrared to transfer electricity to charge batteries and they have even used it but infrared requires direct line of sight with object for the transfer thus making it less feasible for the future.

Iamge Source: treehugger.com

 TIPS

Refer http://www.witricity.com/index.html

When it comes to Love, why is it always, ‘I Love You’??

Image: Google Images

The headline looks confusing but let me tell you that this blog post is a result of my googling about ‘I Love You’. Why is it that a lover always wants to say or listen to these 3 words to judge or to finalize a committing relationship? Do these three words have altogether different understanding in a boy and a gal? (or shall I say Man and Woman?)

Love, well let’s not debate about it or know what it actually is but to keep things simple I can say that since your Mom and Dad loves you hence love is the attachment of emotions present in a relationship within own blood. Now let’s keep our family aside, when you term a closing bond between your friends circle as Love, things get complicated there.

Psychologist put forward through their research that it is highly likely that a girl would firstly attempt to propose a boy when it comes to committing but practically it is the boy who does it. Why?? Well, not a single answer can be justified well but psychologist believes that guys are more willing to take a relationship to the next level (please understand what I mean) and this is what a girl is scared of at first and is likely to put down a proposal if she is not fully sure about committing herself. So practically it is the girl who can sense and judge a relationship well, it is she who can judge if it is right for her and the boy to be committed to each other. For a girl it is more alluring and relieving to hear a boy say ‘I Love You’ after the relationship has moved to the next level (Understand) as many boys (you may not agree) tend to break a relationship after the next level thing!

So, a relationship can go seriously wrong if the girl fails to judge a point because boys (mostly) don’t put much of their thinking into it. This is of course not always true, we do see some dumb girls who change their boyfriend often and same type of boys exists as well, but here we are not considering the relationship of fun.

Thus, this blog post gives one of the millions of reasons why it is always, ‘I Love You’. You may not agree and I don’t have any evidence to prove that I’m right.

Thank God, I could keep the post short; I don’t want to debate love just wanted to put a point.

The online storage drives!!!

Considering your personal computer or smartphone, you will have atleast one file which is more than important to you be it document or an image. Why not then keep the file safely over the web in what is known as cloud storage. It is more secure and there is no fear of losing it. Furthermore if you want to share a file to a huge bunch of people then e-mailing the same to so many people can be quite tedious, why not then generate a web link and let people download the file from the link.

Dropbox provides 2GB of free storage to anyone who sign ups. It is easy to use and very helpful at times (trust me). Visit dropbox, sign-up for an account. You’ll be prompted to download the dropbox software which you must install on your PC. After you install the software a new folder will be created on your computer’s root partition, anything you keep in this folder is saved automatically in dropbox servers whenever you are connected to the internet. Inside this same folder you get to see two sub folders, ‘Photos’ and ‘Public’. Anything you keep in the ‘Public’ folder becomes openly available to anyone in the web. To get the web link you simply need to right click the file, select ‘Dropbox’ then ‘Copy link address’. Same is the case with ‘Photos’ folder where you can keep any photos publicly. Simply read the ‘Get started’ pdf and the attached read me text files in the ‘Dropbox’ folder to learn the simple steps. So no matter where you are, your important files are always with you. Just visit www.dropbox.com, sign in and get all the files that you saved on the ‘Dropbox’ folder. Of course installing the ‘dropbox’ software is not always a necessity. You can simply visit the dropbox site and upload the files. As I told earlier, you can keep your files securely so that only you can access it or make it public

Snapshot during and after installation of dropbox in Windows 7. It is also available for different platforms. 

After you run the downloaded file install the dropbox software

In the notification bar, click the dropbox icon and a menu pops up

The dropbox folder, you can see the Public and Photo sub-folder here

Dropbox is present in the Internet for quite a long time now but not so recently has found many competitors. The Google Drive, drive.google.com. Better than Dropbox in terms of storage as it provides 5GB of free storage. After you sign up in the site with your regular google id (which almost all of you have) you will be prompted to download the ‘Google Drive’ Just one click and no installation required. Similar to the dropbox folder it creates a ‘Google Drive’ folder in the same location. Anything you save on this folder is saved on Google servers when internet connectivity is found. Go anywhere and you have the files with you on the web, just go to drive.google.com

On my personal front, I liked dropbox over Google drive simply because I found dropbox more convenient to use and the files were uploaded on the Internet (or say my dropbox account) immediately after I put a file in the ‘Dropbox’ folder of my computer, it was really fast on a slow internet connection. On the other hand Google Drive took a hell lot of time. Even after putting a very small sized file in the ‘Google Drive’ folder it took more than 3-4 minutes for the file to me shown up in my online G-drive account.

The competition is not only between Dropbox and Google Drive. We have Skydrive from Microsoft. It provides 7GB of free storage to its users and upto 25GB to existing users. I personally have not used skydrive so let me know how you find it incase you happen to use it.

These cloud storage options are getting wider and wider with both Microsoft and Google launching Smartphone applications for it through which a user can very easily store files online from his phone. We already know about Google Docs, the online office editing tool. So files (document ones) kept in Google Drive can be edited as well, ofcourse by Google Docs. Dropbox can provide you more storage (additional 512MB) then the existing 2GB provided you successfully invite your friends through referral. If you’re ready to pay then you can get upto 20GB in dropbox. Similar is the storage extension story for Google.

Dropbox, was simple and easy and it still is. Perfect synchronizing, nothing else.

TIPS
How about having Google Drive as a 'Send to' option in the right click menu? Yes, now you can right click any file and then Send to-->>>--Google Drive, its simple.
I got this tip in my regular tech magazine read. In WIndows 7, click the start menu and in the search bar type, ''%APPDATA%/Microsoft/Windows/SendTo'', now drag in the google drive folder to this SendTo folder and you're done.