In another rewind post, ipXchange looks back to our coverage of Everactive’s Eversensors and the innovations that we have seen since on the road towards a batteryless IoT.
To reiterate, Everactive’s always-on Eversensors are compact sensor pucks that are 2 cm thick and 5 cm in diameter (without antenna). They are powered by PV harvesters that will fully charge the device after 3 days at 200 lux illumination, with full capacitor discharge after 16 hours in total darkness. These IoT reference designs come loaded with temperature, humidity, pressure, and triaxial acceleration sensing, and they transmit this data every 15 seconds to Everactive’s managed, purpose-built network, which was conceived with a 1000-node ultra-low-power IoT in mind.
Everactive’s ambition to remove batteries from IoT devices comes from their shocking calculations that a trillion-sensor world would require 913 million daily battery replacements, supported by a 28-billion-person labour force for battery maintenance. Obviously, this is an unsustainable conclusion, and particularly at Embedded World, ipXchange saw a few companies that are also moving towards batteryless devices. Atmosic and e-peas, for example, have been working on ultra-low-power MCUs and Bluetooth SoCs that support operation using harvested energy so that smaller items like remote controls, asset tracking devices, and even wireless computer keyboards and mice will no longer require batteries.
But Everactive puts its focus on batteryless IoT sensor hubs as their target application, and the demands of these deployments are likely very different to mains-powered devices, which are the focus of Wirepas’ sub-GHz mesh networks, for example; this connectivity solution supports close to a million devices in a single network.
With the move towards a batteryless IoT clearly still a big topic of conversation, you can learn more about Everactive’s Eversensors in our original article here, where you can also apply to evaluate the technology for use in a commercial application.
Alternatively, the full range of energy-harvesting devices that ipXchange has covered can be found here if you’d like to compare what ipXchange has talked about so far. We can only expect this to become a growing sector as the IoT grows and the battery problem starts to become an even wider concern.
Keep designing!