Hands-On Eval of the Eggtronic E2WATT Wireless Power Transfer Evaluation Board

December 16, 2024

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Wireless power transfer is one of the cooler applications I’ve come across recently. It’s getting a lot of attention lately, because its potential is huge, in a fairly broad spectrum of applications. When I saw that Eggtronic had a development kit that would allow me to play around with the technology, I jumped on it. The promise of highly efficient wireless power transfer is quite exciting.

After spending some time with the E2WATT evaluation board, I feel ready to share my experience. Note that it took a lot longer to evaluate the technology than it should have, as it didn’t come with a step-by-step instruction manual. The short answer to “how did it work?” is that it worked pretty much as expected.

The setup was fairly simple, assuming I did everything correctly. Upon conclusion, I ended up getting measurements that were pretty close to what was reported in the documentation, which included tests run by the Eggtronic team.

Setting up the boards was pretty straightforward; it mostly just required power. And being the inquisitive person that I am, I spent more time than I should have researching some of the components that Eggtronic chose to employ.

Eggtronic claims that this system achieves a very high level of efficiency, obviously depending on the distances that it is used at. And while I didn’t do all the calculations at all of the different inputs and different distances, I would agree that the efficiency was likely very high, as that was the case for the measurements I did take.

Another important criterion is that the boards didn’t get too hot. I didn’t have a tool to measure the actual temperature, but I was never in danger of burning myself, even after using it for a while. I have come across some of these systems that can get quite hot. I didn’t get into it with the Eggtronic engineers, but I assume they employed some clever thermal management techniques in the design.

I enjoyed my tiny glimpse into the future of wireless power transfer. I don’t think it’ll be long before it becomes a mainstream technology. I could see a place for it in everything from industrial automation to consumer electronics.

For developers, the E2WATT evaluation board will make it easy to develop prototypes and do further testing. And while the documentation is pretty good, it does require a certain level of technical knowledge in the power field.

The bottom line is that if you’re interested in developing an end product that involves wireless power transfer, I suggest you give the folks at Eggtronic a call.