Search the Community

Already at the end of the year and with all the great fairs in the world held in their different countries, we have seen a fairly significant increase in Qi wireless charging devices, from monitors to floor mats, through headphone stands. A considerable increase that seems to foresee that there will be an explosion in 2020 of this type of technology, but what is it really and how does it work? Qi technology: the future has already begun There are times when a technology does not finish taking off, it does not end up being accepted by its users and therefore it ends up in oblivion or replaced by another that is implemented without problems between products and people. Normally this type of technologies are proprietary and although the company that implements it is very large (Apple case with its connectors for chargers) in the end the users want comfort, a single cable for everything, a single connection for everything, in short, ease for day to day, we pay for that, right? The answer to the need to charge your devices without any cable, that is, wirelessly, came from the Wireless Power Consortium, which together with partners who wanted to enter the program a technology that is based on the remote power transmission. Said power is established as an electromagnetic induction by means of a magnetic field and is generated by a base by way of charging with a transmitter coil, where in the device to be charged another coil has to be introduced as a receiver, so that the magnetic field and Energy transfer is always constant. The main problem they found was that the load depended on the position where the device was, since the distance from coil to coil was a problem and they had to be at a specific point and in a certain position. The solution was just as simple as the problem: placing various coils along the base of the load and the device, where the magnetic field is enhanced and not dependent on a specific position for said load. Two types of charges, two standards in full competition to win the battle Currently there is no definitive Qi standard, because although it seems otherwise, manufacturers fight on two different sides as a general rule: those that carry devices with inductive magnetic load and those that carry magnetic resonance system. The funny thing is that both work through the same principle of inductive coupling, the differences come in efficiency. Devices with inductive load are being imposed on the market because they are more energy efficient speaking, but in return it is less accurate in terms of distance and alignment with the base, something that seems not to be affecting most users too much.