Comment by helpfulContrib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helpfulContrib | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

About 10 years ago I did a research/what-if project, involving energy-harvesting tracker tags .. essentially a smaller/lighter version of the AirTag.

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!!!

This was basically my feeling when doing my PhD - there is energy everywhere and if we make systems power efficient enough there is no real reason we can’t make significantly great use of that energy.

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.

" 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...

Oh for sure, it’s relative to the system being harvested from and the amount of energy being extracted though.

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.

Well it may push for better EMI compliance.

It would need a lot of these devices for the odd mW to really make a difference. It adds up, but it's in the ballpark of a router's status LEDs. These costs are already accounted for as part of the device's operation. Critical systems might start to better direct their transmissions and to reduce side bands instead of saturating the area with energy.

I mean yeah obviously thermodynamics aren't being violated, I think the base idea is that the background noise you're harvesting from was going to be lost as inverse square law losses anyway. Large amounts of sensors would ultimately be as a whole coupled to antennae broadcasting on those frequencies, damping them, and causing the gain circuits to automatically increase output power.

That’s what I was thinking.

Wouldn’t harvesting the stray noise lower the impedance of the thing being noisy, making it use more power to compensate?

Specifically for moving object like air tags, watches “automatic” movements are already a “solution” that would be easy enough to implement, and probably even provide up to a few joules (!!) per day.

(If you want to start a business off this idea feel free to contact me ;) half joking but half serious)

Where were you when I was wrapping up my dissertation? I’ve been in start ups ever since pretty much but not in that area sadly.

Haha I realised this idea after a fair bit of mulling, if it gives any comfort. I’m also coincidentally finishing my thesis, albeit a master’s.

In what areas of startup’s have you been in? More of electrons or software or something?

Manufacturing and now web/architecture (buildings not tech architecture) I left electronics behind many years ago sadly

I have zero interest in this idea, business-wise - it is already a crowded space, Apple are mere new-comers to this - as the more you see these sensor nets grow, the more you realize we are making a big, big psycho-social 'smog' around the ways they can be used ..

So yeah, I'd rather make musical instruments. If anyone wants to talk about that idea, I'm all in.

:)

With you on this, haha. Big tech has heavily crowded the wearables space, with questionable intentions and uses of personal health data.

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…

>Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as well…

Yeah, thats sort of the point. :)

Big Tech may have crowded the wearables space, but Garmin is still quite a player in that field and the description "Big Tech" seems almost as bad a fit for them as "Olathe tinkerer collective" would be.

Have you ever thought of a commercial location tracking solution based off this tech? It’s another heavily, heavily crowded industry, but it has oddly high margins, and a basically-infinite battery life would be a huge selling point

Provide a way to contact you, please.

Ok, I did .. and thanks, needed to do that ..

Seems to go straight to mail subsystem delivery failure?

Fixed - sorry about that, brainfarts abound. Hope you are still interested in making contact!

I wish there was a small and affordable guitar pedal that had shimmer and bitcrush, and only that, with two potmeters and a passthrough button. I think the combination of those two effects is underused. Could it be done only with analog circuits?

By it's very definition, _bit_crush is going to be digital. Shimmer is a variation on reverb and might be possible using analog only but would be an interesting circuit.

I agree that "bits" needs to be digital, but the "bitcrusher effect" can apparently also be implemented in an analog way:

https://www.peterzimon.com/analog-bitcrusher/

Zynthian:

https://zynthian.org

Or Mod DUO:

https://mod.audio/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 ..

Those two projects looks excellent, thanks for the tip!

As a user, I would emphasis the importance of analogical input and feedback to musical instruments. The more analogical input means the more freedom to express nuances. Some but few electronic instruments include easy to use analogical input, with sliders, gyroscope or even the voice directly for example.

For example, the Dualo touch uses a slider and a gyroscope for analogical input:

https://dualo.com/en/dualo/

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 think there is space in the IoT market for a micro-watt platform that harvests energy from the environment. Always on connectivity is silly if it sits idle most of the time (think monitoring systems that take a temperature and moisture readings every 15 minutes), especially if it can communicate via a low power/low bandwidth channel.

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.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...

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

AirTags get about a year of battery life from a 2033 in moderate/typical use cases, according to Apple. That’s 0.675 Wh (Panasonic 2032) / 1 year = 77 microwatts. Or about 7 joules/ day. That’s a lot to guarantee for production. Watch movements are also at least an order of magnitude more expensive than batteries and have a service life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com