Running on Rays of Light and Off-the-Shelf Hardware
We have previously looked at how to make a wireless device live for years on one tiny coin cell battery. This time we up the game and make it live forever, using solar power and off-the-shelf hardware.
We build a prototype of our device and go through the technical details involved in designing for solar power. We use off-the-shelf hardware running the latest version of the Thingsquare ultra low-power software. Light does not provide a lot of power, so we need software that can make the most of it.
[...] There are many situations in which we would like a wireless network that lasts forever:
- Large-scale vineyard monitoring: keeping track of the vines that make up fine wines
- Checking up on those organic crops: believe it or not, agriculture is all about data
- Big city life: cities have parking spaces, trash cans, bus stops, trains and other urban necessities that need to be kept track of
- The great outdoors: knowing where cattle and livestock live their lives means farmers can save money
Sounds like a great project.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 28 2017, @11:17PM
They should worry about utter exhaustion of the electronic spectrum.
You do not need to track every parking space. They really don't go missing. They might be empty, (and that's not all bad).
There is really NOT an inexhaustible supply of band width available for these trivial uses. Pretty soon all you do is raise the noise floor and everything has to shout out its "precious" data more loudly than before.
Sure, you could power lots of these devices by harvesting wasted radio waves from broadcast stations or the millions other such devices screaming their data to nowhere and everywhere.
Besides, there's no point in making primitive tech last forever. Have we learned nothing in the last 50 years?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.