The company plans to launch a more powerful one-watt version later this year, with uses ranging from consumer electronics to drones capable of flying continuously without recharging.
The idea of using this for a drone is laughable. Their coin-size battery produces 100 uW of power, so a small drone drawing a couple dozen watts would need to somehow carry hundreds of thousands of these batteries. Even if they’re only a gram each, that’s still hundreds of kilograms of weight.
Use in consumer electronics is also a terrible idea. Ionization smoke detectors are already regulated due to their americium content; imagine how hard it would be to get regulatory approval for something 100,000 times more radioactive.
I’m confused - they don’t seem to be talking about using the 100 uW version in a drone, they explicitly mention a 1 W version. What’s laughable about that?
Yeah but the drone might still work. What if a second drone (armed with the same battery) follows around the first drone and supports the battery through use of a tether? Then the weight isn’t relevant.
The idea of using this for a drone is laughable. Their coin-size battery produces 100 uW of power, so a small drone drawing a couple dozen watts would need to somehow carry hundreds of thousands of these batteries. Even if they’re only a gram each, that’s still hundreds of kilograms of weight.
Use in consumer electronics is also a terrible idea. Ionization smoke detectors are already regulated due to their americium content; imagine how hard it would be to get regulatory approval for something 100,000 times more radioactive.
I’m confused - they don’t seem to be talking about using the 100 uW version in a drone, they explicitly mention a 1 W version. What’s laughable about that?
I guess that the 1W battery might be proportionally heavier, if it’s using the same material?
That’s correct.
Yeah but the drone might still work. What if a second drone (armed with the same battery) follows around the first drone and supports the battery through use of a tether? Then the weight isn’t relevant.
Then you can make a third drone to support the second drone, and a fourth to support the third, and so on to infinity! Genius!
Four elephant-shaped drones. Which can in turn be supported by a Turtle drone.