Pushing the Boundaries of IoT

Abstract

Battery operated systems are bulky, expensive, and often add unnecessary burden because of their maintenance. They are also harmful to the environment. However, the design and development of batteryless systems are highly challenging as the energy needs to be harvested from user's activities or the environment. The harvested energy also varies with the activity, environment, and other aspects. In this paper, we present a system employing an energy harvesting switch to power a low-power radio, which transmits data wirelessly in 2.4 GHz ISM band. We provide the details of the design of our system and modules. We evaluate our energy harvesting switch which we built in-house. With evaluations, we show that our system works well, and we demonstrate the transmission of 27 bytes at 200 kbps data rate. Further, by varying the transmission power between-10 dBm and 5 dBm, we transmit data packets of length between 19 and 27 bytes with a single press of the switch.