Automatic Charging of Multiple Smartphones Using
Light Beam
K.Lakshmi Joshitha1*, Jayalakshmi T2, Bhavani R2, Preethibala S2
1
Assistant Professor, 2 UG Final Year , Department of ECE , Sri Sai Ram Engineering College
Chennai, India lakshmi.ece@ sairam.edu.in; lakshmijoshitha@yahoo.com
Abstract— The fastening of the communication is due to
the blessing of electronic gadgets like smartphones and
evolving data connectivity. The challenge that is faced is
the energy drain of these gadgets that makes it mandatory
to charge them multiple times a day. Any system that is
capable of performing this task without the user’s
knowledge and effort would really be a boon to the society.
The proposed work aims at charging the gadgets using
light beam. A new approach called auto-charge is used.
The Auto-charge approach is based on two steps. First, we
leverage solar charging technique but use it in indoor
spaces, to remotely charge a smartphone using a light
beam without a wire. Second, we employ an image
processing based technique to detect and track
smartphones on a desk for automatic smartphone
charging. The auto-charge consists of a controller, rotator,
light and camera. The prototype is able to detect the
presence of smartphone within seconds and charge it as
fast as existing wired chargers. Auto-charge is able to
largely reduce the user’s efforts in smartphone charging
and keeps the process absolutely user unaware.
Keywords— auto charge; data connectivity; solar charging;
image processing; smartphones; electronic gadgets.
I. INTRODUCTION
The smartphones of today are equiped with powerful
multicore CPU, large screen and high-speed wireless network
inter-faces which makes them undoubtfully power hungry.
They also run many energy-expensive applications such as
high-end games, sensing applications ,live streaming etc .This
forces the user to take up multiple charging of phones per day.
With almost no work being done without a phone, running
short of battery life time becomes unacceptable in many cases
causing mental burden to the user. Ideally, smartphones
should automatically get recharged so that users do not need to
worry about recharging their smartphones. The system here
utilize the concept of charging by passing a flash light over the
solar panels attached to the mobile sets kept indoor. The
design checks automatically the presence of the mobile using a
camera and switches on the flash light accordingly with
proper orientation.
*Corresponding Author
This enables the auto charging of the mobile with almost no
human effort. The organization of the paper includes the
following. Section II deals with the related works. Section III
deals with the proposed system, section IV gives the flow of
the work, with section V dealing result and discussions.
Section VI concludes the paper with future work.
II. RELATED WORK
Author of [1] has dealt with the history of the technology is
developed in terms of its relationship to the intended
applications. The applications include microwave powered
aircraft and the Solar Power Satellite concept. The wireless
power transfer through strongly coupled magnetic resonance is
discussed in [2, 3]. Abbasi [4] and Sample [5] also deals with
the wireless power transfer with the analysis of the variation in
efficiency and distance between the transmitter and receiver.
Kang in [6] discusses on the scalable energy efficient context
monitoring framework in the BAN/PAN environment fixed
with many sensors. Ra, M. R., Priyantha et al in [7] proposes a
design with low power processor that runs the background
applications with low power consumptions. Susuki in [8] deals
with the reconstruction of the image and the better algorithm
for the image acquisition which is used for the detection of the
multiple mobile phones in our case. Mittal et al in [9] tries to
scale the emulated resources like the processing speed and the
network characteristics to suit to the app that is being used in
an energy efficient manner. Author of [10] has made an
attempt to continuous sensing balancing the application needs
and the resource demand for the continuous sensing. [11] is a
trial of the aquisitional Context Engine, which is the
middleware that deals with the inference caching and
speculative sensing. The system consists of charging a mobile
phone with the help of solar panels. But in most of the cases
the system is dependent on solar rays with high intensity.
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The system consists of a camera along with flash light
connected to the servo motor. So the camera constantly
searches for the solar panel. When the camera makes a
movement the image is taken and given to the MATLAB
section. The MATLAB section compares the image with the
stored image of the solar panel. If the image is matched then it
gives a specific signal indicating that the solar panel is
detected to the controller. Based on that signal, the flash light
is turned ON. So that efficient energy is obtained for charging
the mobile phone through Solar panel. If the image is not
detected then a different signal is provided to the signal. If the
image is not matched then the driver circuit is controlled, and
servo motor is again activated. Each and every time, image is
taken and compared with the stored image for obtaining the
presence of solar panel and charging.
A. FLOW DIAGRAM
section. The MATLAB section compares the image with the
stored image of the solar panel. If the image is matched then it
gives a specific signal indicating that the solar panel is
detected to the controller. Based on that signal, then the flash
light is turned ON. So that sufficient energy is obtained for
charging the mobile phone through the Solar panel. If the
image is not detected then a different signal is provided to the
mobile. If the image is not matched then the driver circuit is
controlled and servo motor is again activated. How often, the
image is taken and compared with the stored image for
checking the presence of mobile for charging.

Fig 2. Image processing part

Fig1. Flow Diagram of the work

III. HARDWARE SETUP

The system consists of two parts: a light charger and a smart
phone. The light charger has four components. A light which
generates a straight light beam, a camera which monitors a
surface like a table, a programmable rotator which moves the
light and the camera to adjust their direction and a controller
which controls the movement of the rotator and turns on/off
the light. The controller also runs necessary software to
analyze the images captured from the camera to detect a smart
Fig 3. Block diagram
phone. The smart phone must be interfaced with a solar panel
to harvest energy from the light beam of the light charger. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The hardware part consists of a camera along with flash light
connected to the servo motor. So the camera constantly The experimental set up of the hardware with 500w flash light
searches for the solar panel. When the camera makes a was made and about seven trials were taken for the smart i-
movement the image is taken and given to the MATLAB phone. The results of the same was tabulated as in table
6.1.The variation of the time for the different models of the
phones from basic set was also studied and analyzed.
Fig4 Hardware setup
Fig 5 camera set up
Though the time for charging is very high, by adjusting the
intensity of the light, the distance and the speed of focusing
the phone the quality of the system can be improved. The
figures 6.1 to 6.4 shows the hardware set up of the entire
system designed. The table 6.1 shows the trials of the time
duration for charging the phone to 1%. This shows that on an
average 4 .43 minutes are needed to charge the phone while
the normal charger takes approximately the same time to
charge initially.
Fig 6 Charging setup
Fig 8 The focusing of the flash light and camera
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The proposed work of an auto charger was designed and
implemented. The key idea of the Auto Charge approach is
identifying the opportunities of smart phone charging from a
user’s existing action of putting a smart phone on a desk and
automatically charging the smart phone without requiring
explicit effort from the user. To achieve it, the mature solar
charging technique is leveraged but should be used it in indoor
spaces. A dedicated light charger was designed to generate a
light beam to charge a smart phone wirelessly and address the
practical issues of indoor light charging. A fast image
processing algorithm was developed to identify smart phones
from pictures. Once a smart phone is detected, a rotator is used
to track the smart phone and project a light beam onto it to
charge it. The whole process is totally automated. A prototype
system of Auto Charge has been developed. Experimental
results show that this prototype implementation is able to
quickly detect a smart phone on a desk in various settings and
charge it as fast as existing wired chargers.
 Despite that this prototype implementation is still far
away from a real product and may be further improved in
many aspects, the feasibility and the step towards automatic
smart phone (and other mobile devices) charging has been
demonstrated. In future, multiple phones can be charged
simultaneously where the preference of charging can be given
to the mobile that has low charge.
TABLE 1. MEASURED TIME FOR CHARGING
Trial no Time for charging in (min)
1 2:26:36
2 3:42:22
3 5:24:14
4 5:48:35
5 5:12:32
6 5:56:45
7 6:45:12
Fig 7. Plot of the charging time
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