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FAQ

Facts and questions.

The questions that surface first on a real integration call — answered straight, without the marketing varnish. Different rooms ask different questions. Pick yours.

Engineers ask one thing. Procurement asks another. Defence asks a third. Investors ask a fourth.

Use the tabs below to jump to the questions that fit your role. Most answers are short — the depth lives in the integration conversation, not on a public page. If your question isn't here, the contact options at the bottom go to the right person directly.

Frequently asked questions by audience

Engineering

Bench-to-platform integration questions.

The engineering questions that come up before, during and after a Dev Kit lands on the bench. The deeper certifications matrix and integration playbook are released to qualifying briefs after review.

Why not just use pogo pins?

Pogo pins look cheaper on a spreadsheet. They don't stay cheap. Two metal contacts rubbing every cycle, multiple times a day, for ten years — they pit, they corrode, they drift out of tolerance. They're exposed to whatever the platform meets in the field. They cap power, with no electric vehicle in production using them above a few hundred watts.

Designing a sealed pogo dock from scratch is a multi-month engineering programme on its own. NOA drops in from day one and removes the contact entirely.

Why not battery swap?

Battery swap turns every charge into a labour event. Each swap needs a certified technician, months of training to handle a hazardous load, and pays at the loaded rate. Each swap is also a chance for human error — a wrong-way connector, a short, a dropped cell.

Wireless removes the technician, the certification overhead and the failure mode in one move. The platform lands on the dock the same way every time, day or night, with no operator in the loop.

How long does integration actually take?

A Dev Kit gets to a working bench setup in days, not quarters. Most engineering teams have it powering the receiver and tuning the configurator in their first session.

Total integration time scales with how custom the dock and enclosure are — that part is yours to design. NOA's electronics, the configurator, the protections and the firmware are ready out of the box.

Do I have to redesign the platform?

Usually not. Depending on platform maturity, integration touches mounting points, the power-path connection to the BMS, dock geometry alignment, and a few firmware hooks.

The goal is adaptation, not redesign — and the help to do it comes from NOA's engineering team alongside yours, not a downloadable SDK.

What about EMI and EMC compliance with my sensors and radios?

The resonant inductive design is engineered against CISPR / FCC Part 15 emissions limits and is characterised before it ships to a Dev Kit programme. Final certification belongs to the integrated platform — the rating depends on your housing, your shielding, your antenna placement.

Jurisdiction-specific testing (CE, FCC, MIL-STD) is matched to the deployment context during the integration conversation.

How tolerant is the air gap to misalignment?

The Dev Kit ships in the 5–20 mm band; the wider platform range scales up to 30 mm with coil and integration choices. Lateral and angular tolerance is high — the design is forgiving enough for battered landings, dock mechanical drift, and real-world vibration. That's the whole point. Efficiency stays close to peak inside the design envelope and degrades gracefully outside it.

Coil selection during integration narrows the envelope to the platform's specific dock geometry. The interchangeable coil set is what makes the same electronics fit a wearable and a marine ROV without re-spinning the board.

What about heat?

Up to 93% efficiency means almost nothing converts to heat. Modules run at 28 °C under continuous full load — dense-packable and quiet on thermal sensors. Competing wireless systems run at 80–90 °C and need active cooling. NOA's low thermal output gives platform integrators flexibility on production cooling — passive heat sinks, vented enclosures, or fans, depending on the cavity and the application. Dev kits ship with bench fans so engineers can push to the upper edge of the spec safely; production cooling is a platform-design decision.

That heat budget is the difference between sealing the enclosure and venting it.

How does foreign-object detection work? Will it false-trip on metallic platforms?

Foreign-object detection (FOD), over-current protection (OCP) and over-voltage protection (OVP) are built into the module. They cut power in under 2 ms when triggered.

The detection profile is tuned during integration against the platform's own materials — chassis, mounts, payload — so legitimate metal in the airframe doesn't read as a foreign object. False-trip behaviour is part of bench tuning before any deployment, not a post-hoc surprise.

What battery chemistries and pack configurations are supported?

The module integrates with smart BMS designs from 1-cell to 9-cell packs. Switchable regulator modes — battery charge, constant voltage, constant current — are configured from the web-based NOA Configurator over USB-C.

For engineers who want raw rectified output to feed their own regulator, a single solder jumper drops NOA's onboard regulation out of the path.

What's the standby draw on the receiver side?

Below 0.5 W. That's the figure that matters when a drone is parked on the pad or a robot is idle between sorties — the quiescent budget that decides how long a fleet can wait between charge cycles without bleeding the cell.

What happens if the link breaks mid-charge — does it brick the cell?

No. The module fails gracefully. Loss of coupling, FOD, OCP, OVP and thermal events all cut power cleanly without back-feeding the cell or stranding it in a half-charged state.

The next valid landing on the pad re-establishes the link and restarts charging in under two seconds.

Can I scale from a 100 W proto to a 250 W production unit without re-engineering the integration?

That's deliberate. The 1 W to 500 W power family runs on one architecture — same protections, same configurator, same firmware approach. The 100 W Dev Kit is the lower bound. The 250 W Dev Kit is also shipping now. The 500 W class is the upper bound of the standard product family; above that, NOA engages on a project / partnership basis.

Integration work done once carries forward through the family. See the power family roadmap on the Technology page.

Will I be locked into NOA Wireless modules?

NOA is the source for its modules — there is no licensed second manufacturer of the IP, by design. What's portable is the integration architecture you build around it: your dock, your enclosure, your BMS hooks. Those don't change if the module class steps up (100 W → 250 W → 500 W) or if a future generation of the architecture lands.

The dependency is on a power family, not a single SKU.

Can I keep my existing pogo pins as a fallback for retrofits?

Yes — for retrofits. If the chassis is locked and you're adding wireless to an existing platform, NOA can sit alongside pogo pins as a redundancy path.

New designs typically drop the pins entirely once integration is proven. The extra grams, the extra BOM line, and the failure mode you've now built in stop being worth it.

How is this different from other wireless power vendors?

Most wireless power vendors target either extreme power (EV-class kilowatts) or extreme distance (over-the-air). Both impose cost and integration burdens that don't suit autonomous robotics or drones.

NOA is engineered for the platforms running the field — tight spaces, weight budgets that move grams, mixed environments where one design ships into rain and one into dust, a cool-running architecture that gives integrators real choice on cooling, certification owned by your team. Gen-1 wireless power technologies own extreme power. Legacy wireless power systems own extreme distance. NOA owns deployable.

How do I actually get a kit?

The qualifier on the Request a Dev Kit page is the brief. Five minutes, five fields. We seed kits to engineering teams working on platforms that fit the technology — not to research-stage projects without a clear path to integration.

Either it's a fit and you get a kit, or we say so honestly.

Most integration conversations
stall at the datasheet.
NOA Wireless starts with what you're
actually building
.

Fast Integration brief in 15 minutes
Selective Dev Kits seed to qualifying teams only
Request a Dev Kit