Based on AirFuel Alliance’s AirFuel RF wireless charging protocol, this evaluation kit by Energous and Atmosic enables engineers to test truly wireless power transmission to solve the issues of battery wastage and excess cabling in IoT applications.
Target use cases include RF tags, electronic shelf labels, digital displays, and IoT sensor nodes, with a maximum range of up to 15 m – this is highly dependent on the power consumption of the devices to be powered.
The kit features the following devices/infrastructure to support evaluation of this technology:
- 1x Energous 1-W WattUp PowerBridge transmitter
- 2x Atmosic battery-fee IoT sensors
- Atmosic mobile app to monitor and control the devices
The WattUp PowerBridge transmitter features Energous’ EN4100 transmitter IC and EN3210 power amplifier IC for wireless power at a distance. Additional Bluetooth connectivity is used to configure the transmitter and support data collection from the devices that the PowerBridge powers.
This device demonstrates how such a technology can be used to streamline IoT installations by providing power and data connectivity using a single ‘router’. AirFuel RF is interoperable with standard wireless protocols like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth thanks to a carefully selected transmission band that does not interfere with these technologies.
The battery-free sensor nodes measure temperature, humidity, and 3-axis acceleration, and are built around Atmosic’s ATM3202 Bluetooth LE SoC with integrated RF energy harvesting capabilities. This RF harvester features an MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) algorithm to maximise the harvesting performance over the input range, ensuring controlled power delivery regardless of the distance from the transmitter.
These devices consume approximately 25% the power of typical Bluetooth sensor nodes and provide a great reference design for fast development of devices to be powered over the air.
Learn more about this EVK in the official product brief, but if you’ve got a commercial application and want to evaluate this technology, fill out the form below and ipXchange will get you connected (and powered) with Energous.
(Image sourced from Energous)
