Has anyone tried using one of these for your cell phone in the under the bridge area? AFAIK this area is directly atop of the yaw rate sensor. I am leery of if the mats would put out any significant EMI to interfere with the operations of this sensor and/or anything else. Thoughts?
The efficiency loss of adding a wireless circuit is noticable but it isn't really that much considering we aren't talking about much total current here (it's a phone -- not a Tesla). Typical efficient wall wart wired chargers are in the range of 85-87% efficiency. A wall wart + wireless charging pad places the charger at a total efficiency of 60-70%. I personally have one at home and it's convenient to just drop the phone on top of it. In a car though, I can't imagine it would work very well as your phone needs to remain in a fixed position relative to the pad at least for a Qi charger (a few times I've placed the phone haphazardly on the charger and it didn't charge overnight). If you go over bumps, your phone will have to reconnect with the charger. This won't be very efficient and the reconnect beeps will probably annoy you. Finally, while i haven't tested it, I cannot imagine that the inductive field that the wireless chargers use is that strong that it would work well with one of those non-slip pads between the phone and the charger (to solve the phone movement problem). As far as a Yaw sensor is concerned: it sounds like most Priuses use a gyroscopic vs a electromechanical based yaw sensor. In either case though, the electromagnetic field required to affect that sensor from that distance through the plastic+padding+vehicle floor is probably several orders of magnitude more than what the inducter in the pad can put out. -mm
