Talk:The Powers of Induction
Proposal Review
Strengths
- Overview is clear, describing the project, competition in the market, and this project's differentiation factors from those products.
- Gantt Chart is very detailed, gives a good understanding of the steps they need to take.
- Budget is detailed, organized, and easy to read
Weaknesses
Although the intuition regarding this project is clear, this proposal needs to be more detailed regarding factors that have a significant impact on the budget and work schedule. Your description of the project indicates that the most important features are:
- Wireless charging of a phone.
- Power supply is a battery, not a plugged power supply.
- Two charging modes: far (slow) and close (fast).
I'm going to focus on details of each of these features below.
Wireless charging is challenging, hence there are many proprietary standards and protocols in the market. Your budget considers buying an iQi antenna compatible with modern iPhones, but you do not consider buying a compatible base station, instead you are buying wire and ferrite cores, hence I assume (your proposal does not explain why the choice) that you will use them to build a new base station. I fail to see how you are going to guarantee that your hand-made base station is compatible with the iQi antenna. Moreover, if you try to build the antenna at the same time you build the base station, then this project becomes significantly more challenging. On the other hand, if you buy a base station then the wireless-charging part of your project becomes trivial. I don't see a clear winner between these three options, hence you will have to choose one, and clearly explain in your proposal your reasoning and your plan to address the challenges that arise.
Using a battery as power supply for the antenna is an interesting idea, but technically difficult to implement. I assume (your proposal provides no details on this aspect either) that the Arduino board, transistor, resistors, capacitor, and regulator are meant to implement a smart interconnection between the battery and base station. To make your base station work you will most likely have to add a reasonably fast switching mechanism (between 10K-100KHz), I do not see how such a mechanism can be designed with the items in your budget. Also, Li-ion can become unsafe if operated outside their specification (high currents, induced spikes, etc.), so your circuit needs to take basic security measures.
Although having two charging modes is a nice feature, this is something you will not achieve via trail-and-error experimentation. Either you already know the technical and practical steps to take to implement this feature, or you should leave it outside your proposal.
Your proposal states that the demo will include plugging random phones to your charger. That is potentially dangerous, since you can fry a stranger's phone, or you can plug something that is outside the specification of your charger. Instead, I suggest removing the phone from the picture, focusing on the safe transfer of power to a standard port (say, a USB A port providing 5V and 0.5A). It is less practical, but much safer and easier to design.
In short, your proposal lacks details. Please improve your proposal by first sketching the whole system working, then identifying the most important functional parts, and finally choosing which items to build and which ones to purchase based on the features required by each functional part.
Other comments:
- Team member names included as its own section title
- The objectives section should be a list of bullet points, since it is easier to read and reference. Currently the objectives have some unnecessary explanations in them such as "at short distances, tight inductive coupling is preferred due to lower electromagnetic and heat emissions."
- Physical specifications should be an objective. Since it was said that it will be portable, there should be size and weight restrictions. Anything can be moved, but not everything can be moved easily.
Humberto 15:11, 8 February 2017 (CST)
