iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag: Funding Suspended

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating?ref=email

by MarlonPro • 12 years ago

56 45 12 years ago

mehdim• 12 years ago

why suspended?

daeken4• 12 years ago

According to comments, the project is a big bag o' fraud. Some good information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-wo...

uptown• 12 years ago

There's a lot of skepticism whether their product is in-any-way feasible. The concern is that they're raising money without a technically-viable product.

daeken4• 12 years ago

Seems there's a bit more to it than just that. They claimed that they had pending patents when they don't (or at least, the patent numbers they gave are bunk), their demo video had bluetooth turned off, and some other nasty things. It seems to me that if they do have a legitimate product, they sure picked a bad way to show that.

therobot24• 12 years ago

any news as to why it was suspended? I checked the updates and didn't see anything

philmcc• 12 years ago

This is a message one of the backers received (according to the comments):

Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team.

We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled.

A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include:

• A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere

• Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project

• Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator

• Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part.

We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules.

As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message.

Regards,

Kickstarter Trust & Safety

hgsigala• 12 years ago

I received the same message but with $16

makomk• 12 years ago

There was a bunch of news articles about the fact their product is almost certainly being impossible, and Kickstarter presumably decided they didn't want the bad press. (Merely violating the laws of physics isn't enough for them to take action.)

mentos• 12 years ago

pulled from the comments:

Hello, This is a message from Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team. We’re writing to notify you that the iFind - The World's First Battery-Free Item Locating Tag project has been suspended, and your $1.00 USD pledge has been canceled. A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter's rules, which include: • A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere • Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project • Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator • Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners Accordingly, all funding has been stopped and backers will not be charged for their pledges. No further action is required on your part. We take the integrity of the Kickstarter system very seriously. We only suspend projects when we find strong evidence that they are misrepresenting themselves or otherwise violating the letter or spirit of Kickstarter's rules. As a policy, we do not offer comment on project suspensions beyond what is stated in this message. Regards, Kickstarter Trust & Safety Rules Community Guidelines Terms of Use

columbo• 12 years ago

Couldn't you do this with RFID tags and a scanner on your phone? I don't know if this is legitimate or not, but something like this: http://agbeat.com/tech-news/rfid-enabled-devices-keep-tabs-o...

daeken4• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why they say these are RFID-enabled; all the tags they show are BTLE. The difference being that BTLE devices are active transmitters (they have a battery), and RFID tags are passive, having their energy provided via radio waves or magnetic coupling.

The problem with RFID is that past a few feet, you need a lot of energy to power them (it falls off with the inverse-square law), which your phone just won't (and shouldn't) put out. So RFID is dead in the water for this sort of thing, but BTLE solutions abound and are quite cheap, despite that they need to have a battery.

TTPrograms3• 12 years ago

IIRC RFID actually falls off with R^4 because the power gets transmitted to the RFID tag and then it's reduced by the same factor again when it transmits back.

giarc3• 12 years ago

RFID works at very close range (think swipe cards to get into an office). Readers with larger ranges do exist, but they get very pricey.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

RFID is basically an application of radar, and as such suffers from an inverse fourth power dropoff with range. Radio is inverse square, but when you reflect it off something, you suffer that inverse square twice. So while doubling the range drops your received radio power by a factor of 4, it drops your received RFID response power by a factor of 16. To have more than a tiny range, you need a lot of transmitting power and a really good receiver.

imaginenore• 12 years ago

No, my father designs RFID readers and antennas. The long-range UHF readers reach 9-15 feet (with passive credit-card size tags).

bri3d2• 12 years ago

Regardless of all of the technical arguments about RFID range, the idea behind this product is that it beeps, so you don't need fancy locating equipment.

I don't know of any passive RFID tags with enough left-over power to run a loud beeper.

You would need a strongly directional antenna and user input (or an antenna array) to find the tag using the phone itself, which would be a relatively bulky and expensive piece of equipment.

If you're just trying to find something using radio, a 100% passive system like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECCO is simpler and cheaper anyway.

smackfu• 12 years ago

Interesting. I bought some of the Tiles (link below), and they are basically the same thing, except they have a 1-year battery and are a bit thicker. They work fine.

http://www.thetileapp.com/

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

Why wouldn't people just use RFID tags? They're cheap and batteryless. You could slip one in your phone's battery cover to locate it (or tape it on) and the locator could be a 'dumb' brick of plastic and a tiny circuit with a 9V battery that's mated to the tags.

giarc3• 12 years ago

RFID doesn't work at large ranges. You would basically have to be holding the RFID reader with 10cm of the object you are trying to find to actually get a signal.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

If you could put a central emitter coil in your house somewhere, how strong would the field need to be to hit every part of the house? Hmm...

bri3d2• 12 years ago

Passive RFID tags can't beep, so the locator would need to either use multiple antennas and fun algorithms (indoor location is pretty hard, especially if your device is small and the antennas are close together) or a highly directional antenna and user antenna-waving input.

The nice part about beeping locating tags (for those without hearing disabilities, of course) is that rather than using complex RF approaches to location, they just make noise and let the human do something they're already good at: locate a sound.

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

The locater thingy you would carry in your hand could beep faster when it gets close to a tag.

mortenjorck2• 12 years ago

If this isn't the smoking gun, it's at least the smoke:

  Unlike other locating tags, there is no battery in the iFind tag. 
  It recycles electromagnetic energy and stores it in a unique power bank.

This is the sort of language that never describes an actual technological breakthrough. It's a combination of a description that's too pat, too abstracted, with a feat that is too impressive to go without at least some reference to the actual processes that make it work.

vlunkr• 12 years ago

Exactly, if they really created this battery-less technology they could probably do things much more impressive than iFind

mikeash2• 12 years ago

Not really. There's nothing fundamentally interesting or new here. It's the same principle as a crystal radio, but somewhat more complex since they're claiming to store power over time and then use it in bursts.

The real problem here is simply that their claimed power budget can't be covered by the RF emissions they say that it uses. But the idea is reasonably sound even if their implementation may not be.

vsviridov• 12 years ago

http://hackaday.com/2013/01/15/ltc3105-and-ltc3109-energy-ha...

There are chips that allow you to gather and store miniscule amounts of electricity from surrounding RF radiation. Bluetooth LE is also designed to be a very low-power devices, so it is within the realm of possibility for this particular project.

publicfig• 12 years ago

To future readers, the title used to say "SUSPENDED: iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag". Unfortunately, the title was changed, removing all of the context of its posting. Just another reason the automated title changers need to be reëvaluated.

mortenjorck2• 12 years ago

I don't understand why HN still has a field for manually entering titles if the system is capable of scraping it from the linked site, and does it automatically within a few minutes of posting.

lazerwalker• 12 years ago

Because sometimes being able to manually add in editorializing can be valuable.

In this specific example, the added "SUSPENDED" that was removed gave context about why the link was interesting.

nicksergeant• 12 years ago

There are actual human beings on HN who are tasked with changing submission titles.

dang• 12 years ago

We put "Funding Suspended" back. "Funding Suspended" is in fact a subtitle of the OP at present, so there's no problem having it in the HN title.

But the submitted title should not have said "SUSPENDED:" in all-caps. We try to keep the HN front page free of clamor.

joosters• 12 years ago

Related articles about the dubious nature of this kickstarter (grabbed from a comment on the KS project page):

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185038-ifind-worlds-first...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/ifind_kickstarter/

http://bgr.com/2014/06/24/kickstarter-wetag-ifind-scam/

51Cards• 12 years ago

One more... http://hackaday.com/2014/05/21/ask-hackaday-can-battery-free...

jkestner• 12 years ago

The definitive engineering breakdown: http://drop-kicker.com/2014/06/ifind-rf-energy-harvesting-bl...

(Drop-Kicker is amazing.)

iFind – Battery-Free Item Locating Tag: Funding Suspended

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