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Battery Free Phone

Make Calls Without Ever Charging a Battery


What is the Battery Free Phone?

We present the first battery-free cellphone design that consumes only a few micro-watts of power. Our design can sense speech, actuate the earphones, and switch between uplink and downlink communications, all in real time. Our system optimizes transmission and reception of speech while simultaneously harvesting power which enables the battery-free cellphone to operate continuously. The battery-free device prototype is built using commercial-off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board. It can operate on power that is harvested from RF signals transmitted by a basestation 31 feet (9.4 m) away. Further, using power harvested from ambient light with tiny photodiodes, we show that our device can communicate with a basestation that is 50 feet (15.2 m) away. Finally, we perform the first Skype call using a battery-free phone over a cellular network, via our custom bridged basestation. This we believe is a major leap in the capability of battery-free devices and a step towards a fully functional battery-free cellphone.

People

Students

Vamsi Talla
Bryce Kellogg
Sam Crow
Wu Meiling

Faculty

Shyam Gollakota
Joshua R. Smith

Contact: batteryfreephone@cs.washington.edu

Publications

Battery Free Cellphone
Vamsi Talla, Bryce Kellogg, Shyam Gollakota, Joshua R. Smith
IMWUT, February 2017 [PDF]

Links

UW Networks & Mobile Systems Lab
UW Sensor Systems Lab

© Bryce Kellogg, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington.
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