The most useful product by far I saw at CES was this kickstarter project to build an ultra small charger. Yes, you have seen tiny chargers for tablets and phones but they don't have the power to charge a laptop. You need at least 65 watts for that use. Now there is such a device: the Finsix Dart:
The outside is aluminum and just a shroud. It is just twice as long as your typical USB charger. Yet it powers a laptop and of course, your other devices that use USB cord.
I always buy two chargers for my laptops so that I have one permanently in my travel backpack. Otherwise I forget it at home and nothing, nothing is worse than being on a trip some place and realize you don't have your charger with you. When I recently bought a second one for my Zbook 14 HP laptop, it cost something like $250. And was nearly impossible to locate. Yes, there are a ton of $40 ones on Amazon/ebay that claim to be authentic chargers but they are not. They are Chinese knock-offs with no regulatory certification and reliability testing. You are risking your life using them especially unattended.
Back to this thing, I think they said the retail price is $89 so a lot cheaper. And this thing is light and tiny. So it wins on multiple fronts.
The trick as they say in the video is higher switching rate. Linear power supplies run at line frequencies of 50 and 60 Hz. Switching supplies are smaller because they run at 30 Khz and up. The higher you go, the smaller the magnetic component, i.e. transformer gets. But at some frequency this becomes tricky to design. If the unit runs at many Megahertz as they imply, it would have been pretty challenging to design.
This was a kick starter project that blew past its target of $200K to finish at over $450K. Good for them. Really nice people at the booth.
They are going through FCC certification and such which I imagine may not be easy although the aluminum case surely helps.
I will be buying a bunch of them when they come out
. It comes with various adapters to fit the connectors on many laptops. It puts out 18 volts which should make it compatible with many laptops (there are secondary voltage regulators in the laptop to adjust this down so small variations like 19 or 17 is no issue).
They are selling them here: http://finsix.com/dart/. Let's support this innovation by picking up a few. They hope to hit $500K and once there, make a detachable cord for it.
Well done, well done, well done! Engineering saves the human race again.
The outside is aluminum and just a shroud. It is just twice as long as your typical USB charger. Yet it powers a laptop and of course, your other devices that use USB cord.
I always buy two chargers for my laptops so that I have one permanently in my travel backpack. Otherwise I forget it at home and nothing, nothing is worse than being on a trip some place and realize you don't have your charger with you. When I recently bought a second one for my Zbook 14 HP laptop, it cost something like $250. And was nearly impossible to locate. Yes, there are a ton of $40 ones on Amazon/ebay that claim to be authentic chargers but they are not. They are Chinese knock-offs with no regulatory certification and reliability testing. You are risking your life using them especially unattended.
Back to this thing, I think they said the retail price is $89 so a lot cheaper. And this thing is light and tiny. So it wins on multiple fronts.
The trick as they say in the video is higher switching rate. Linear power supplies run at line frequencies of 50 and 60 Hz. Switching supplies are smaller because they run at 30 Khz and up. The higher you go, the smaller the magnetic component, i.e. transformer gets. But at some frequency this becomes tricky to design. If the unit runs at many Megahertz as they imply, it would have been pretty challenging to design.
This was a kick starter project that blew past its target of $200K to finish at over $450K. Good for them. Really nice people at the booth.
They are going through FCC certification and such which I imagine may not be easy although the aluminum case surely helps.
I will be buying a bunch of them when they come out
. It comes with various adapters to fit the connectors on many laptops. It puts out 18 volts which should make it compatible with many laptops (there are secondary voltage regulators in the laptop to adjust this down so small variations like 19 or 17 is no issue).They are selling them here: http://finsix.com/dart/. Let's support this innovation by picking up a few. They hope to hit $500K and once there, make a detachable cord for it.
Well done, well done, well done! Engineering saves the human race again.
