An open competition to build a smaller power inverter, with a $1M prize

At first I was like &quot;Why would you do that for only $1m? If you had that big of a breakthrough, you could easily generate that (and then a lot more) by selling it yourself.&quot; Then I read that they aren&#x27;t taking the IP, and are just giving you the cash as a pure incentive. They can publish your high level approach documents, but you still own the invention.<p>I wish more of these contests were run that way. I think they&#x27;d yield much high quality and differentiated results with a lot more entrants.

I saw this earlier and briefly considered it. 50W&#x2F;inch^3 is soldering iron level heat dissipation. And my take on it was that it really isn&#x27;t possible unless you can cheat and have the &quot;inverter&quot; be the thing on the end of a solid copper bar that is sitting in ice water on the other end :-). So really they are looking for a 10X improvement in efficiency. Which is to say to take something which is 90% efficient and make it 99% efficient. Even looking at the wide bandgap semiconductors they reference on the web site I&#x27;m having a hard time getting more than a few percentage points more efficient.

Wouldn&#x27;t it be more efficient to simply drive all our electronics equipment directly off DC? Almost all electronics devices now days run off 5VDC (USB) or 12VDC, Solar panels put out 12VDC, all those conversions seem like a waste of energy. What if you just run our big appliances off 120VAC and run all our small stuff off of Solar directly along with a battery back up. It seems like if a new wiring standard were developed that had both AC and DC distribution it would greatly reduce the cost of installing Solar. In fact, I believe it would be possible to put a DC bias on top of the AC (similar to the way old time phone lines work). Just a thought, rather than shrinking the inverter, think outside the box and get rid of the inverter all together.

<i>2. ELIGIBILITY: To be eligible to enter the Contest, you must be: (1) above the age of majority in the country, state, province or jurisdiction of residence (or at least twenty years old in Taiwan) at the time of entry; (2) not a resident of Italy, Brazil, Quebec, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, or Sudan; (3) not a person or entity under U.S. export controls or sanctions; and (4) have access to the Internet as of July 22, 2014</i><p>I wonder why Italy, Brazil, and Quebec are included. The other countries are under special sanctions regimes already but I can&#x27;t think of a good reason to exclude these three or why the contest would be considered illegal there.

Seems like we just need to switch to DC already. 60hz AC is good for resistance heat and... that&#x27;s about it. We are at a point now where we&#x27;re creating DC on our roofs, turning it into AC to go through the walls of our house, then turning it right back into DC to charge our cars and power our other electronics. With losses and expensive hardware at each step.

This story was previously discussed on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730042" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7730042</a>

Why does inverter size matter? The inverter is already smaller than the battery or PV panel components, so it&#x27;s not immediately obvious to me what groundbreaking new applications will be possible with an even smaller one.

Why is there any need to make it much smaller than the solar panels that will be providing the power?<p>I can see where ultra-thin (and flexible) would be a benefit, but why not allow the electronics to spread out over the entire area of the solar panels? The space is being used up already.<p>That gets rid of the super high power density problem.<p>The sun delivers about 1KW per square meter, so even if the solar panels were 100% efficient, you&#x27;d have an entire <i>square meter</i> of room for a 1KW inverter.

Already done. When I worked in EVs we used a HybridPack2 power module from Infineon. It&#x27;s about the size of a sandwich but longer, and skinnier. You add a driver board, a logic board, a capacitor, connectors, cold plate. It&#x27;s about the size of a shoe box and can deliver 100kW continuously. I pushed one under ideal conditions to 200kW.<p>Of course, liquid cooling means a total system that is quite a bit larger than I describe. In order to get rid of liquid cooling at that power level you&#x27;d have to get the losses down by a huge margin. We were dissipating 2-3kW at high power, so for air cooling you&#x27;d need to get that down by a factor of at least 10. The only way to drive the heat down like that is at the semiconductor device level.<p>This is a challenge that everyone in the field is already aware of and working on, while people outside the field have no ability to do meaningful research.<p>At the small scale, an Arduino with the mega-moto shield can push some hundreds of watts in a few cubic inches. So what exactly is the challenge?

Anyone know why this is particularly hard?

Anyone have any ideas why they highlight <i>only</i> &quot;wide bandgap device manufacturers&quot;? I&#x27;m hope they&#x27;d accept a winning solution with different tech, but surely there are other possibilities they could mention right at the start?

But a lot of devices convert to DC internally! Would it be hard to dispose of that redundancy? It seems to me there&#x27;d be less need for a power inverter that way. EDIT - some semirelevant discussions: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730205" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7730205</a> - in the past thread, reasoning about usage of AC vs. DC <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8071524" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8071524</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8071670" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8071670</a> - DC vs. AC

Assuming one was starting from scratch and didn&#x27;t care whether the available appliances of the day required AC or DC power, but all the power coming into the home was solar, what would the motors on the appliances look like? Would it still be desirable to use AC motors, and if not, would it be practical (other than for the obvious reasons) for appliances to use a standard DC voltage?<p>I don&#x27;t mean to suggest that we abandon ac powered appliances, I&#x27;m just curious about what electrical wizards would come up with, if they were doing it all over again.

Could someone explain, in layman&#x27;s terms, what the difficulty in building a smaller inverter is? I unfortunately paid less attention in high school Physics than I wish I had.

Maybe a stupid question: Would that work: create a small electric motor, mount one coil on the rotating wheel and mount another on the stand. Now put DC on fixed coil and AC would be generated on the other side (like in transformer)... Or will this not work? :-) (I am not an electrician.)<p>I know, I know - mechanical parts are not optimal - and also there are losses for electric motor - but the size is in question here...

does anyone know why the list of countries that this contest is blocked from are:<p>&quot;ITALY, BRAZIL, QUEBEC, CUBA, IRAN, SYRIA, NORTH KOREA, AND SUDAN.[1]&quot;<p>aren&#x27;t the first three places strange to see on that list?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.littleboxchallenge.com/pdf/LBC-TermsAndConditions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.littleboxchallenge.com&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;LBC-TermsAndCondition...</a>

I&#x27;m just tickled by how many commenters have a <i>totally obvious</i> solution to this problem. Surely, the hundreds (thousands?) of experts at Google, the IEEE, and the ~8 manufacturers who put this contest together are just fools who couldn&#x27;t come up with such amazing, brilliant ideas themselves.<p>Congrats in advance, and enjoy your million bucks!

There are all sorts of specifications&#x2F;requirements listed (box size, ripple allowed, EMI limits) but the most interesting that is not mentioned is cost. There is no upper limit set on the BOM cost.

What&#x27;s the difference between a picnic cooler sized inverter, and the one in my Jeep, which is nowhere near the size of a picnic cooler?

Got an email today &#x27;registration declined&#x27;. :(

didn&#x27;t FINsix solve this problem: <a href="http://finsix.com/dart/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;finsix.com&#x2F;dart&#x2F;</a>

The simplest solution (just give me the $1mil now) is to cut out the middle man. I mean, there is a needless conversion here from DC to A&#x2F;C, and then back to DC. Not that many devices need A&#x2F;C these days - maybe just your alarm clock, if it&#x27;s cheap enough (since cheap alarm clocks use the alternating current frequency for keeping time, instead of a precise resonating crystal.)<p>Example of what they have now: [solar-dc] -&gt; [inverter] -&gt; [ac&#x2F;dc transformer] -&gt; [device].<p>Cut out the inverter, the ac&#x2F;dc transformer and you have:<p>[solar-dc] -&gt; [device]<p>Required materials: wire cutters, cheap voltage regulator IC, some wire. Done. I&#x27;ll take a cashier&#x27;s check please.

Anyone who has lived off the grid understands that an inverter is the least efficient solution to the problem of running consumer devices from a DC source. We laugh at the newbies running an inverter to supply a laptop PS that takes AC right back to DC. Hopelessly inefficient.<p>DC-DC is the way to go, or else if you need higher voltage, take an auxiliary feed from the charge controller, since most solar puts out 21-25VDC anyway. For more efficient and powerful motors, use series battery banks. Duh.<p>This is just another way of pandering to the people who do not understand efficiency and who are locked into the idea of &quot;house current&quot;, in other words, dinosaurs.<p>Our industrialized world is so inefficient that we throw away about 80% of generated power. What a holocaust for the natural environment! When you go off-grid, that just won&#x27;t fly, because no one wants to upsize their generation capacity five-fold to run some inefficient consumer device, except for the aforementioned newbies who have yet to notice an open artery.<p>Inverters simply extend the inefficiency of the consumer experience to alternative forms of power generation. The smart solution is not to make the inverter smaller but to lose it entirely.