Powercast recently presented (09/21/2011) at the Remote Monitoring & Control Conference in Nashville, TN. The cost of installing wiring can range from $200 per device to >$1000 per foot in some industrial environments. In either case, wireless power transmission over distance using RF energy can potentially be a suitable alternative to running wires or replacing batteries.
Both ECN and Wireless Design & Development (WD&D) have published a recent article by Powercast titled “RF energy Harvesting Perpetually Powers Wireless Sensors”, which looks at using broadcasted RF energy as a reliable long-term power source for battery-less wireless sensors.
Read more at EDN | Read more at WD&D
An article in RFID Journal recently reviewed the Powercast Lifetime Power Wireless Sensor System which has battery-less wireless sensors (passive wireless sensor tags) powered by RF energy.
“Powercast Corp. is marketing active RFID sensor tags that harvest power from RF signals. The system includes an RF transmitter that provides power signals to sensor tags, and a gateway that receives information transmitted by those tags. The company’s focus is on developing solutions for the wireless transmission of sensor data, such as what is required by data centers. In this case, rather than using wired sensors or traditional active RFID tags to send sensor data regarding a room’s conditions, the Powercast system simply uses continuous RF signals to charge a battery or capacitor built into a sensor tag. The solution, known as the Lifetime Power Wireless Sensor System, targets the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) sector, as well as other building-controls industries, by providing a solution for acquiring data from sensors for heating and air-conditioning, lighting controls, access controls or other building automation.”
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.
In an earlier post we demonstrated an iPhone powering LEDs in close proximity using Powercast’s RF energy harvesting technology.
The video below demonstrates the use of a standard iPhone in 2G mode to generate RF energy that is used to power a battery-free wireless sensor node. The sensor node is part of Powercast’s Lifetime Power (TM) Energy Harvesting Development Kit for Wireless Senors (P2110-EVAL-01), the receiving board is based on the P2110 Powerharvester Receiver, and the antenna was slightly modified from it’s original tuning for 915MHz.
The wireless sensor node was designed by Powercast and Microchip for ultra-low power operation. At a distance of 2 feet from the iPhone packets are transmitted from node every every 1-2 seconds. As this video shows, mobile phones can be a practical, portable source of wireless power for a wide range of applications.
Powercast’s TX91501 Powercaster transmitter was selected by EDN for the Hot 100 Products of 2010. This transmitter sends both power and data for remote powering/charging in conjunction with Powercast’s P1110 or P2110 Powerharvester receivers.
Broadcasted RF energy creates a predictable, controllable power source to provide power-over-distance and one-to-many charging. Unlike potentially unreliable or intermittent solar, heat or vibration micro-power energy sources, the TX91501 transmitter sends power to enable wireless devices to charge and operate completely untethered from the power source, and power can be sent on-demand, scheduled, or continuously. End-devices can be inherently dormant, with zero-standby power, until power is sent to operate the device, or batteries can be trickle-charged remotely. The operating distance for wireless power transfer (wireless charging) from the TX91501 transmitter to a device with the P2110 Powerharvester Receiver is about 40 feet with a reasonable size receiving antenna.
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.
Components of the kit include:
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.
Product Listing | User’s Manual | Press Release
Powercast released the the TX91501 Powercaster(TM) Transmitter to send power and data to remote devices for battery-charging or battery-free operation. The TX91501 uses DSSS modulator for power and ASK modulation for data, and is intended to be used in conjunction with Powerharvester Receivers. The power output is either 1W or 3W based on the product version, and the data is a transmitter ID code that can be used for activating specific end devices, location tracking, or other applications.
The TX91501 transmitter is approved by the FCC (Part 15) and Industry Canada. It can be used to broadcast RF energy for both power and data in numerous energy-harvesting applications such as environmental monitoring, building automation, energy management and industrial monitoring.
Broadcasted RF energy creates a perpetual power source, unlike potentially unreliable solar, heat or vibration energy sources, to provide power-over-distance, one-to-many charging, and controllable wireless power (continuous, scheduled or on-demand). A wire- and battery-free power source enables zero-maintenance devices which deploy to inaccessible locations, and embeds within sealed devices for use in wet or harsh environments.
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.
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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