Frost & Sullivan has recently released a report detailing the Top 50 Tech Trends. Included among them are Wireless Sensors, Energy Harvesting, and Wireless Charging.
Powercast exhibited at the Sensors Expo 2011 and demonstrated using RF energy harvesting to wirelessly charge credit card size devices. The devices are representative of high function, rechargeable smart cards and contained rechargeable thin-film batteries - CYMBET EnerChip, Infinite Power Solutions THINERGY, and STMicroelectronics EnerFilm.
The video below shows the rechargeable smart card devices receiving charge from an RF transmitter. The transmitter was on the floor under the table.
John Titus at ECN has recently published an article titled “Energy Harvesting Suits Remote Low Power Devices“, which includes updates on energy harvesting technology from multiple companies including CYMBET, Humdinger, Microstrain, Mide, and Powercast.
Grabbing “free” energy involves more engineering than buying an off-the-shelf transducer. Contrary to what you might think, the awareness of “green power” didn’t spawn the drive to harvest energy. Low-power electronic fabrication technologies did the trick. They cut the power needs of small monitoring devices to the point where energy harvesting has started to make engineering and economic sense.
As announced back in October 2010, Powercast released a development kit to showcase using RF energy for remotely powering battery-free wireless sensors. Jon Titus of Design News was gracious enough to review the kit and gave Powercast ratings of 5 out of 5 in all four areas of the review: Ease of Set-up, Quality and Clarity of Documentation, Overall Experience, and Meets Expectations.
The article is titled “Kit Harvests RF Energy” and we appreciate the subtitle “Engineers who must implement low-power devices that cannot run on local power need this kit from Powercast Corp.”
The components in the kit enable wireless and battery-free operation of the sensor nodes at a distance of 40-45 feet (13-15 meters). Each sensor board can measure temperature, humidity, light, and an external sensor. This can be used for a number of applications including building automation, energy management and industrial monitoring. Power is provided by Powercast’s new 3W transmitter (TX91501-3W-ID), which also sends factory-set data. The P2110 Powerharvester receiver converts the RF energy from the receiving antenna and stores it into a capacitor, which is then boosted to operate the wireless sensor board. The Microchip XLP 16-bit Development Board with the 802.15.4 radio is the access point.
The Economist recently released a special report on the benefits of using wireless sensors for monitoring of critical infrastructure - buildings, bridges, and tunnels.
Powercast, with the support of Infinite Power Solutions, has released the Lifetime Power® Energy Harvesting Development Kit for Battery Charging. This kit provides long-range, wireless trickle charging of battery-based systems for low-power applications. The kit features the THINERGY® Micro-Energy Cell from Infinite Power Solutions (IPS), and also supports traditional rechargeable batteries including Lithium Ion, Alkaline, and Ni-MH, as well as other solid-state/thin-film batteries.
The components in the kit enable wireless battery charging at a distance of 40-45 feet (13-15 meters). The charging board can directly charge a THINERGY Micro-Energy Cell or connect to the THINERGY ADP. This can be used for a number of applications including building automation, energy management and industrial monitoring. Power is provided by Powercast’s new 3W transmitter (TX91501-3W-ID), which also sends factory-set data. The P2110 Powerharvester receiver converts the RF energy from the receiving antenna and stores it into a capacitor, which is then boosted as a regulated output to pulse-charge a battery.
The kit (part number P2110-EVAL-01) includes the following items:
1 - 3W Powercaster Transmitter - 915MHz (TX91501-3W-ID)
2 - P2110 Evaluation Board (P2110-EVB)
2 - Directional, patch antennas - 915MHz
2 - Omni-directional dipole antennas - 915MHz
2 - Wireless Sensor Boards (WSN-EVAL-01)
1 - Microchip XLP 16-bit Development Board
1 - Microchip 802.15.4, 2.4GHz radio
1 - PICkit programmer/debugger
The components in the kit enable wireless and battery-free operation of the sensor nodes at a distance of 40-45 feet (13-15 meters). Each sensor board can measure temperature, humidity, light, and an external sensor. This can be used for a number of applications including building automation, energy management and industrial monitoring. Power is provided by Powercast’s new 3W transmitter (TX91501-3W-ID), which also sends factory-set data. The P2110 Powerharvester receiver converts the RF energy from the receiving antenna and stores it into a capacitor, which is then boosted to operate the wireless sensor board. The Microchip XLP 16-bit Development Board with the 802.15.4 radio is the access point.
Eliminating batteries, or using smaller rechargeable batteries, through micro-power energy harvesting would help to reduce the number of batteries shipped or the lithium content.
Powercast recently presented about wireless power technology and RF energy harvesting to an innovation forum hosted by North River Ventures. Following that meeting North River posted a review of Powercast’s technology.
Low Power, Free Power
Powercast provides remote, wireless power capability to micro-power devices by harvesting RF power and converting it to DC power.
Powercast is the stuff of revolution: it spreads cloud access to hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, of small, low power (microwatt and milliwatt) M2M devices. Placed anywhere from the simple, like a hotel room motion detector, to the complex, like a reverse osmosis filter that needs constant monitoring but that is hard, and costly, to check by hand, embedded Powercast devices allow its “hosts” to talk to one another cheaply and efficiently. Doing this, Powercast brings on line, as it were, a universe of productivity and information tools of unlimited application. It makes microwatt devices edge servers.
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