
Teeny-Tiny Bluetooth Transmitter Runs on Less Than 1 Milliwatt - Bilters
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/design/teenytiny-bluetooth-transmitter-runs-on-less-than-1-milliwatt
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cf498
If that is practical to use, it would open an entire new field of
applications. Constrained devices currently consume roughly 50 times that much
during transmission on 802.15.4 or BLE. While there are sensors who are used
for 10 years on a coincell, they achive this by spending most of their
lifetime in deepsleep at under 1uA with disabled transceivers.

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edoo
Does anyone remember the amazing backscatter tech by the UW kids
([https://www.jeevawireless.com/](https://www.jeevawireless.com/))? I've been
waiting on them for years now. They were supposed to be to market by now with
a $0.25 chip that does 2.4GHz at 1/10,000 of the power. They have reliable
functional demos doing long range transmission using 59 micro watts. They were
also working on a battery free emergency cell phone.

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jackhack
And thus begins a Cambrian explosion of new spy devices that run (practically)
forever off a button cell.

The bleed/drain rate of many batteries is far more than 1mw.

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nerfhammer
FYI this is not terribly new – BLE was already extremely power efficient and
could easily run for > 1 year on a watch battery

you're not going to be able to stream audio or video from a device like this,
but BLE was not designed for that anyway.

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penagwin
I'd love to see what kind of range we can expect from that haha. Still a great
achievement for BLE! I have an iPhone and often find it via saying "Hey Siri",
and have sorely wished for a way to locate more "mundane" objects, and if this
were to ever cost around the price of an ESP8266 it'd make that possible. (Yes
there is tile and similar tags, but those are expensive, and I mean to have a
tracker on a bunch of items)

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DiabloD3
I never understood Tile and the rest.

The only thing I want a locator on is my phone.

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ryandvm
You've never misplaced anything but your phone?

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lm28469
Creating more electronic waste for that once in a year time you need to locate
your keys VS spending 15 min to find them.

It's nice in theory but it doesn't really solve anything, a bit like Juicero,
nike self lacing shoes, &c.

If you start putting bluetooth tags on everything you could potentially forget
somewhere you're in for a wild ride.

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lozaning
Im envious of your ability to keep track of your things. I end up needing to
use the one of my tiles to find either my keys, phone, wallet or work badge
almost every other day.

When the batteries in them go dead its easy enough to to swap them out myself
for new ones.

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ryanwaggoner
Wow! Forgive me, but why can’t you just keep them in the same place? My wallet
and keys are 100% of the time in the same place when I’m at home, and my phone
is either in my pocket, my hand, charging in a specific spot, or on a random
surface in the house. That last one is rare, but happens. It takes roughly 30
seconds to walk through the house and find it. What am I missing?

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Diederich
Different people are different.

I now keep my personal things in the same place at home >99% of the time, but
it's taken me _decades_ of training to get to this point.

For example, I used to walk in with my keys, and would be ready to put them
into their home. But there could be an interruption between the time I used
the keys to open the front door and when I put them in their home. For me,
that situation would often cause me to put my keys in an inappropriate place,
which often caused them to get 'lost' later on.

The behaviour modification, for me, was causing me to resist any reaction to
any interruption until the necessary things landed where they belonged.

Different people are different.

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ryanwaggoner
That sounds more like you just need to have the place that you put your keys
immediately by the door.

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40dslf
Getting closer to Jim and Pam bluetooth earpiece?

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mobilemidget
What would be the distance range of such tiny transmitter?

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asteli
like any transmitter, this depends on the gain of your receiver :)

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howard941
And the stuff you have to penetrate. I turn the power down to -40dbm on one of
our products during "Just works" BLE bonding to help minimize the surface area
but I have the luxury of thin plastic enclosures, decent trace antennas, and
the ability to force the user to place the devices right next to each other.

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lam
Which BLE chip do you use? On the nRF51, it actually remaps -40dBm to -30dBm.
With the newer nRF52, you can use NFC for OOB authentication for more
security. I'd love to know more what you're working on.

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howard941
The 52832 in a third party module and as you know that maps -30 to -40. NFC
would have been nice but my hardware guy didn't bring the pins out on either
side which is a damn shame because I don't have any user inputs other than
power on/off on one side of the link. Email is in my profile if you'd like to
know more

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tomcam
Isn’t this low enough to use ambient radio waves for power?

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quietriot
"...magnetic monopole..." is mentioned in the photo caption :)

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tzs
It's "magnetic monopole antenna". A "monopole antenna" is a type of antenna.
There are different type of monopole antenna. Two of the types are called
"electric monopole antennas" and "magnetic monopole antennas". Here's a paper
that looks at those two types [1].

[1]
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dd05/23adec09486c283e1ab348...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dd05/23adec09486c283e1ab3480db0f1d78201c4.pdf)

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comboy
This is quintessence of a typical discussion on the Internet. Context matters
and it's expensive to gather appropriate context. Usually it's not as simple
to explain as in this case.

"I don't have to read further because I know for a fact that <this bit> is
bullshit". It's a fair heuristic. It's just that it is so difficult to have a
deeper meaningful discussion without some trust established first (so that you
know you're not wasting your time).

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quietriot
As a ham with an Extra class license I'm understanding that it was a type of
antenna and am now regretting this commentary but for just a moment wondered
if it was an April fools page published early.

I do have an interest in magnetic antennas (antennas in general) and also
appreciate the paper listed by tzs. Thank you tzs!

Sorry for dropping the SNR in here :)

