# What's causing the audible 7/8th rhythm in Qi chargers?

I have a wireless Qi charging system for my mobile phone. When I put the phone into the cradle it starts getting charged and I can hear a very quiet noise coming from the arrangement. Other questions (like What might cause audible noise in an inductive charging system?) are dealing with why there is noise at all, and that's understood.

I am curious why the noise (at least in my case) is so strangely rhythmed. It is not a constant squeal as the author of the other Q described. It is rather a repeating rhythmic tic pattern with a period of just under two seconds. I can reproduce the pattern by saying something like

chip-chip-chip-chip-chip-chip-tatata


and repeat this right away (so it goes ...-chip-tatatachip-chip-chip-...). The delay after each chip is around 0.27s, the delay after a ta is around 0.09s, so that as a whole the pattern has a period of 6×0.27s + 3×0.09s = 1.89s.

To the musicians among us: The rhythm sounds like six 8th notes and then a triplet of the length of another 8th, so it is a 7/8th rhythm.

Can anybody explain what't going on in these circuits? I have been searching for an answer for quite some time now but I found no mentionings of any rhythmic aspect in combination with wireless charging in general or Qi specifically.

It might be a special property of my charger of course, so I am not sure that this is reproducible for others.

EDIT: I managed to create a recording of the sound. It is very silent, so there is a lot of noise captured as well. Especially a wall clock in ~1m distance is clearly audible over the signal. Here is a spectrogram of the recording over several seconds in the range 4kHz - 20kHz. The pattern is clearly visible (and on the bottom you see the ticking of the wall clock).

I would love to upload an mp3 of the recording but this site doesn't make it as easy for sounds as for images. Does anybody know of a equivalent of Imgur for sounds?

EDIT 2: I uploaded a recording to YouTube as a commenter suggested: https://youtu.be/xKPyiHGkoks

• ”Nureek.” So the next one will be a “rotut” and the one after that will be a “hanunga.” – winny Nov 21 '18 at 17:31
• Definitely aliens trying to communicate. – Andy aka Nov 21 '18 at 18:03
• the charger circuit consists of two coils of wire in close proximity to each other ..... the coil in the charger base is being driven by AC ..... as a result, any ferrous object that is brought into close proximity of the charger base coil will vibrate like a speaker ..... i think that you can fill in the rest ..... also read this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetostriction – jsotola Nov 21 '18 at 20:16
• @jsotola I guess you didn't read very much of my Q otherwise you would have found that I already linked to another Q which covers the topic of magnetostriction. My Q is about the rhythm of the audible ticking while charging. – Alfe Nov 21 '18 at 21:27
• I'm curious to hear the sound, can you record and upload it? – peufeu Nov 21 '18 at 22:03