Everactive combines very low power requirements with electricity generated from ambient energy – internal or external solar, or a heat sink driving a Peltier device – to make wireless IoT sensors that never need batteries changed.
Founded by Ben Calhoun and Dave Wentzloff, Everactive sensors generate energy from sources like indoor solar, which gathers energy from artificial lighting, and peltier devices which use waste heat to generate electricity. The sensors monitor for temperature, humidity, light levels, vibration, movement, sound and pressure, enhancing situational awareness at ranges of up to 350 metres.
Supporting the sensors are sub-microwatt wakeup receivers, ultra-low-power integrated circuits, and power-saving technology that cycles some sensors on and off very quickly to save power. Everactive solutions send data via a proprietary low-power network to a gateway that’s supports hundreds of sensors at a time and connects to Everactive’s Evercloud for monitoring and analysis.
Though the field devices use power saving techniques, the wireless protocol used by the sensors doesn’t use duty cycling or other transmission halts to save energy, so the network is always active. The sensors transmit on a sub-GHz frequency, so propagate through walls and other barriers.
According to Everactive, deployment of several thousand battery-powered sensors on a large site creates considerable labour when it comes to battery changes, as well as the cost of the batteries. Meanwhile there are challenging applications in high-risk or hard to access environments in industrial and commercial applications that are especially well suited to battery-free sensors.
#sen.news #SEN #SENnews #security #electronics
