Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnetic wave noise
sony-semicon.com
sony-semicon.com
If you’re willing to sacrifice always on connectivity and have a node report in on an infrequent basis then I always figured EM harvesting would be the way to go for most applications since even a tiny amount of energy can build up over time to become a useful amount.
I knew I’d gone deep into this world when I started thinking that micro watts was a large amount of power!
Also a question if such harvester need its own power source to be able to operate?
They cite a super wide range of EM freqs from Hz to MHz, and an efficient antenna...
Harvesters don’t need their own power supply and ideally the system can come back to life from totally empty (meaning it doesn’t need to be deployed with any charge level)
I was doing my thing back before the packaged harvester management chips were available and I made a PIC based microcontroller system that could monitor the charge level in a capacitor fed from a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester and decide when to wake up and transmit a data reading based on the capacitors charge level.
The trick was getting the PIC’s sleep current draw low enough that the capacitor was charging even at milli g level vibration levels - from memory you can get a PIC’s sleep current well down in the tens of nano amp range.
PICs have a built in voltage reference that is stable (a zener or schotkey diode from memory of 0.6V?) and a way to read what the Vsupply (basically the capacitor) is compared to it. So the PIC would wake up every 30 seconds, check Vsupply to the built in reference and, when high enough fully wake up, take and transmit a reading and go back to sleep.
From memory I got it running at 50mg transmitting every few minutes.
I got a nice journal publication in IEEE for that work.
So the harvester sustains itself, keeps filling up the bucket, and periodically reports out the progress.
I guess it's a balancing game, as the filling up process is probably slow, so the target's draw needs to be low too.
The main use of energy harvesting is for powering wireless sensor nodes, so this was a simple implementation of that.
https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/...
Looks like it was an IET journal, I think my IEEE publications were all conferences.
It used energy-harvesting for the sensor packages, essentially charging caps if things got wet/moved/etc., but would boot up to do the sensor-data processing and communication (BLE/ANT) .. my lead on the project brought his dusty old home phone in, to give us all a stable power source, but we didn't really need it much - lots of 800mhz-900mhz in the city.
Was fun to realize, even back then, that we are literally surrounded by energy and don't really have an energy problem. We have an energy management problem, which we have yet to localize at the individual, and are instead spreading the problem across our society.
But, in between builds on this project, I would often daydream of a scenario where computing devices ran simply on background radiation, and there was no longer any need for cables, really, in order to compute.
Its fun to note we're getting closer and closer to that point. Okay, I could build a solar powered computer and also feel such satisfaction, but .. an all-in-one wafer that simply ran on cosmic noise?
Hell yeah, gimme that, sparkies!!!
(If you want to start a business off this idea feel free to contact me ;) half joking but half serious)
In what areas of startup’s have you been in? More of electrons or software or something?
So yeah, I'd rather make musical instruments. If anyone wants to talk about that idea, I'm all in.
:)
Additionally, when doing research around kinetic / thermal energy harvesting technology for a wearable design project (gesture recognizing smart ring) for school, we found modules to have far too low a volumetric energy density (W/mm^3) to be useful, where size matters more than anything else.
Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as well…
Yeah, thats sort of the point. :)
Or Mod DUO:
.. can both do what you want, and a ton more to boot - I know you specifically asked for simple and cheap - well, these devices are cheap and .. amazing ..
For example, the Dualo touch uses a slider and a gyroscope for analogical input:
The voice recorded through a mic can also be a nice anological input, such as in the Rc-505 loop station:
https://www.boss.info/global/products/rc-505mk2/
Even better if there is an analogical feedback. For example with springs under buttons, rubber bands attached to finger rings or other crazy ideas.
I build a system for an agriculture client like this with each node only having a very small solar panel (6in^2) and some super capacitors that kept it reporting data throughout the night. We even used performance metrics from the voltage being output by the solar panel to measure how cloudy it was. These devices reported via LoRa to a base station setup that was connected to a PoE system so we just ran a single Cat-6 STP line to a pole in the middle of the property.
I think the other aspect of “always on” is that the operator isn’t going to pick up the sensor years down the line. They’re just going to leave it dead and buried, especially if the sensors have to live inside the earth There’s ongoing work on harvesting electricity out of soil
That being said, it’s not the energy per se that we can tap into, it’s the gradient created as it dissipates/moves that we tap into. Heat is great, but not if it’s uniform, solar is great, but not if it harvesting it casts an area in shadow that needs it, vibration is great so long as it doesn’t damp and further load the system it’s being taken from.
Don't all of these Harvesting systems load a system? For example one of the transmitters somewhere. Yes it is microwatts and no transmitter will notice a single unit. However if we start to talk large quantity of sensors, who is really paying the price? Otherwise we are admitting that Free Energy is a real thing.
You and others may find the recently released Nexperia NBM5100 and NBM7100 of interest. While aimed at batteries it functionally translates high impedance power sources to lower impedance to charge up caps for IoT usage.
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
If it’s a train cart/carriage then not really a problem as there is so much mass and vibration to go around, if it’s the surface of a small industrial machine that needs to be reasonably balanced only producing a few hundred milli g then more of a concern.
Wouldn’t harvesting the stray noise lower the impedance of the thing being noisy, making it use more power to compensate?
I forget the minimum amount but so long as there was more than say 20 mG (milli-gravity) of vibration acceleration then it could harvest from empty.
So really neat to see your system did not suffer from that.
However, the research group I was in was focussed on using silicon carbide devices for hostile environment sensors (think high temp gas sensors primarily) and looking at how to make FETs from SiC that could work in high temp/high radiation environments etc.
This is why my thesis and papers primarily focussed on testing energy harvesting devices at temperature - batteries won't work at 300degC and running power cables up and into a volcano fumarole is a tad awkward.
I had this feeling though that if I didn't get a room temperature, off the shelf components, system working I would have missed a key part of the learning - I just got lucky that the system was novel enough for a paper publication.
I'd love to see an open source energy harvester, especially if it is based on off the shelf components. Low power sensors without a battery would be a major plus for the environment.
You Must Construct Additional PylonsIf these devices can be built cheaply, just place them all over a factory, chirping their ID whenever they have enough power to do so. You map the IDs to locations and get a real-time map of where there's EM noise spitting out. When the map starts changing from it's usual patterns, then you identify the source of that change.
If there is ambient radio, you can also use that for extremely low power data transmission from your sensors. The trick there is to not actually transmit any of your own energy. You instead either absorb or reflect the ambient radio. This is called backscatter communications.
Here is a video showing a demonstration of both energy harvesting from ambient radio and backscatter data transmission [1].
If you use WiFi signals as your ambient radio for backscatter, the research group in that video has also demonstrated that you can make your backscatter data stream match standard WiFi protocols so that you can use ordinary WiFi equipment for the receiver.
The above was fairly short range, but even so there are a lot of interesting applications. For instance you might want to have moisture sensors inside a wall to detect water leaks early. If your sensors are powered by ambient EM energy (noise or radio), you don't have to limit the sensors to places where you can easily reach them later to change batteries. They are fine if they are behind brick or drywall with no openings.
- Harvesting from several dozen μW to several dozen mW of power.
- Harvesting from Hz to MHz freq EM noise
- 7x7 mm component footprint
I'm impressed; even though this idea isn't 100% new, the execution seems solid!
The second thing is the low frequency stuff. Its taught in most EE programs that you can use an antenna that is tuned to a frequency to transfer energy wirelessly from xmitter to receiver (see NFC or RFID) but antennas that tune sub-MHz frequencies are typically quite long in order to have some level efficiency. That they do this by exploiting geometry of various conducive elements and get enough energy is super impressive too.
If you followed the old BEAM stuff[1] that Mark Tilden promoted, you could see some ideas about two-phase devices that live in a "collect" phase charging up an energy reservoir and then an "execute" phase where they dump that energy doing their thing. BEAM was focused on robotics and bug like behaviors but there is no reason you couldn't have a sensor that measures temperature and humidity and transmits that to a receiver somewhere. Or a passive "game" camera that, once it has collected enough energy, takes a snapshot when it detects motion and sends that along.
I'll be interested to see this stuff get commercialized and designed in. It does have shades of "Smart Dust"[2] though which is pretty ripe for abuse.
What a great point of entry into robotics and hardware design it was for a whole generation of engineers and roboticists. It provided a very low cost (it was encouraged that the parts for these robots came from old broken electronics. They were also super simple designs which were explained in great detail, very well. This combination made for a very good education in the foundations of robotics, engineering, mechatronics, hardware and system design, etc.
BEAM, the Parallax Basic Stamp, the Tandy 1000RLX, and the RB5X robot and the summer classes I took with the makers the RB5X all had a huge impact on my ability to architect, design and build robots professionally.
https://e-peas.com/product/aem13920-dual-source-energy-harve...
The Nexperia chips are also worth looking at, in that they translate high impedance sources to low enough to charge a cap:
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
The energy comes from the amplifier, it's being put into the ether by the woofer, and then the window pane collects it.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed.
The thing is, we don't have general purpose "windows" in this EM world, until now.
Thermal noise is not a tone, though.
It's weird for yoi to bring up thermal "noise". What you are referring to is thermal decay, entropy. Yes, you can harness this too, but it's a different mechanism and not really pertinent here.
But at the same time I can't understand how such a thing works using pure white noise. Feynman famously described (and disproved) a similar energy-harvesting device [0] except one that uses mechanical noise and a mechanical rectifier instead of the electrical noise and electrical rectifier of Sony. He showed that such a device will eventually stop working due to the second law of thermodynamics. Why doesn't that happen in the Sony chip?
It's the whole reason radio was invented.
If it were illegal, AM crystal radios would also have to be illegal. That's where radio all started.
Also, your phone harvests RF energy every time you charge it wirelessly with a Qi charger.
Lots of implanted devices are powered this way too
it’s hard to point at anything in the press release and confidently say “that’s new”. i think what’s happening is that IoT/sensing is a big enough market that companies can finally invest in engineering and commercializing some of the things that have been researched over the last several decades. which imo is great to see.
"RF is RF"