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Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnetic wave noise
- Workaccount2 3y agoSeems like a potential nightmare when your sensor network's operation is contingent on one badly tuned power circuit in a crappy Chinese LED floodlight in the janitors closet being perpetually left on.
- vestrigi 3y agoQuestion is whether this could harvest enough energy to store it in a small battery to continuously provide power. But really sounds frightening if you change the setup of a few appliances and then suddenly half of your autonomously powered devices don't get enough power anymore because the noise is not high enough anymore.
- Workaccount2 3y agoOn a more serious note, I'm sure that if you needed a reliable network, you would use purpose built emitters to power everything.
- rusabd 3y agocould be very useful in-doors where solar is not possible and wiring is not practical. A lot of sensors do not have to be on all the time - occasional reading is more than enough.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYou Must Construct Additional Pylons
- justsomehnguy 3y agoIt's quite amusing what this comment attracts so many up and downvotes, yet no one comments why.
- jareklupinski 3y agoif the intent of the system was to monitor energy waste, no signal is good signal :)
- mabbo 3y agoSeems like an interesting way to identify machines that are breaking down. If 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.
- dclowd9901 3y agoReminds me of a neat video I saw once on the inner workings of a sheet metal stamping factory (for car parts). They used a directional microphone array pointed at the inspected machine and compared audio waves and overlayed “hot spots” on a display to see how the machine was working and where it was malfunctioning.
- tzs 3y agoIt is not just ambient electrical noise that contains usable energy. Others have demonstrated practical sensor energy harvesting from ambient WiFi and ambient broadcast TV signals. I'd expect that the Sony device can probably use those too, so if you've got WiFi in your building you should be fine. 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9cbxLSOkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9cbxLSOkE
- 0xDEF 3y agoEnergy harvesting makes more sense for ultra-low-power IoT sensors with a battery life of 2-3 years being extended to 5-10 years.
- buescher 3y agoIt’s worth doing the energy budget calculation as an exercise for that.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoDon't worry, by the time you work out the source of your data outage, Sony will have a wireless power module to sell you as well. It will be wildly inefficient however, so you'll want to only run it when there is actually a data outage. By the time you work that out, there will be orchestration services available that notice the outage and respond by temporarily flipping on the wireless power module. A sensor on one side of the room driving a machine on the other side, and somehow we've got it dependent on a cloud service on the other side of the planet. The future is looking bright.
- simonbarker87 3y agoI did my PhD on energy harvesting (specially focussing on hostile environments with high temperature or high radiation) around 15 years ago and harvesting from stray EM radiation was the holy grail for room temperature stuff where vibrations or heat gradients couldn’t be found. 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!
- zoomablemind 3y agoDoes this sort of harvesting rely upon some internal accumulator like a capacitor before the energy could be fed elsewhere? 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...
- simonbarker87 3y agoYes, you need a reservoir to store the charge (energy) which in my case was the limiting factor to deployment in high temperature environments as capacitors get very leaky as temperature increases. 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.
- coffeeshopgoth 3y agoSo, to capture this better, would you then design your factory with acoustics in mind (more so than now), too? Like areas where soundwaves would bounce to resonate and concentrate to hit sensors?
- goodpoint 3y agoThe article is just marketing. RF energy harvesting has been around for more than a decade.
- tzs 3y agoThe ones I've read about before harvested from radio such as WiFi or broadcast TV. With this one they are talking about harvesting from EM noise from things that aren't intentional transmitters. Is that new?
- goodpoint 3y agoIt's not new. RF is RF.
- colinsane 3y agooverhead power lines aren’t intentional transmitters but some form of “could i power a device from the RF leakage?” gets asked on EE stack exchange at least once a year since its inception. 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.
- af3d 3y agoThe novelty seems to be the form-factor. It's energy harvesting made simpler for low-power applications. (A small microprocessor for example, LED's, sensors, etc.)
- buescher 3y agoThe form factor does not include the antenna.
- itishappy 3y agoCome now, we've been at this for quite a bit longer than a decade! https://patents.google.com/patent/US685955 https://patents.google.com/patent/US685955
- kwhitefoot 3y agoDidn't Nokia have a proof of concept mobile using something like this ten years ago?
- liveoneggs 3y agoDoesn't the human body also generate electromagnetic noise?
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoI don't know what magnitude of noise is made by the body's electrical system, but everything above absolute zero will emit some EM radiation.
- hughesjj 3y agoWell, all electromagnetically interacting matter right? I don't think neutrinos etc will do so
- foobiekr 3y agoThe nice thing about RF harvesting is you can have a beacon that keeps an area charged. Atmosic powered remotes with some TVs do this by having a beacon in the TV providing power.
- isoprophlex 3y agoRelevant stats - 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!
- buescher 3y agoThose are claimed numbers and are pretty similar what Atmosic needs as ambient input to their rf harvesting chips. Field strength and antenna aperture/efficiency/size left as an exercise.
- anonymousiam 3y agoI did some work in this area about a decade ago. The issues I ran into involved converting the energy into something that can be stored. If semiconductors are used for detection/rectification, the band-gap voltage must be overcome before any energy is recovered. Specialized devices with very low band-gap voltages are available, but losses are still significant.
- rpaddock 3y agoThe rather obscure semi. company E-Peas has been making similar harvesting chips for a while: https://e-peas.com/product/aem13920-dual-source-energy-harvesting 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/battery-management-ics/series/NBM5100.html https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics... https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics/battery-management-ics/NBM7100ABQ.html https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
- allan_s 3y agoJust to get a raw idea, can this accumulate enough power to gather a gps position and send it over wifi / 4g nb-iot signal ? I have only very basic knowledge so not enough to make an estimation of the kind of things this can power
- rpaddock 3y agoWhile possible it is unlikely. It would take a considerable amount of time to accumulate that amount of energy needed from these sources. These systems are generally used for transmitters that transmit for a couple of seconds at most and may be off for the rest of the day. Enough energy would have to be accumulated to run the GPS long enough to get a valid fix etc.
- allan_s 3y agoThanks so the ballpark estimation of how "intensive" it can be is 1 or 2 measure a day from a local sensor and transmission over 4g ?
- amelius 3y agoWhat if someone tries to beam energy across the room, and this device starts acting as a man in the middle?
- robertlagrant 3y agoThis is what FreeVolt[0] is - Oxford spinout in which I have a microscopic number of shares. [0] https://freevolt.tech https://freevolt.tech
- appplication 3y agoThis is really cool, but also seems rather indexed on physical cards. I have to imagine as we go towards more tech centric physical checkouts, we’re probably leaning more into device-based methods (phone, watch, etc). I imagine we will see less physical cards moving forward due to devices being able to fill this niche in a more secure way.
- robertlagrant 3y agoAgreed - that's the commercialisation approach they've gone with, but it's not the only one. I think access cards have legs still because corporations won't necessarily want to enroll people into BYOD situations (what happens if my phone battery dies, etc), nor issue everyone phones, and cards are just simple to administrate. But yeah I can imagine the opportunity isn't infinite.
- cosmojg 3y agoAssuming they're reprogrammable, why not just build such cards into phones?
- robertlagrant 3y agoWell, you can. It's more that what do visitors do, or what do people do if their phone is flat? Issue physical cards as well?
- surfingdino 3y agoThat's some sleeper cell!
- ChuckMcM 3y agoOkay, this is pretty cool. Effectively lowering the EM noise floor in their vicinity by rectifying the energy is a neat trick. The catch has always been that the level of energy was such that the conversion circuitry for ambient noise was unable to process enough to both power itself and provide a bit extra (efficiency losses effectively prevented any net energy conversion). That they managed to do that is what I find so impressive. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics [2] https://www.nanowerk.com/smartdust.php https://www.nanowerk.com/smartdust.php
- iancmceachern 3y agoYes, BEAM! It's been years since I thought of that. 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.
- codethief 3y agoI suppose "noise" requires a more precise definition here – I assume they don't mean a thermal background. Or otherwise I'm left wondering how this squares with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: You start with high entropy (thermal noise) and end up with low entropy (a charged battery)?
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt's like when your windows vibrate when you turn up the bass. 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.
- codethief 3y agoYes, exactly, you are talking about a coherent bass tone (sine/cosine) for which the window happens to be resonant. This energy can be extracted of course. Thermal noise is not a tone, though.
- iancmceachern 3y agoYes, but EMI noise is (Its called frequency). Which is the mechanism by which the the Sony module in question operates. 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.
- sova 3y agoWow. Scientists at Stanford figured this out to a demonstrable idea over ten years ago I believe. I am looking for the article, ambient power for IoT devices.
- buildsjets 3y agoWardenclyffe on a chip. Neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
- eig 3y agoThis is Sony, so their electrical engineers clearly know what they are doing. 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? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
- buescher 3y agoBecause RF energy harvesting depends on an external energy source - it’s the same reason a crystal radio or solar calculator can keep working as long as it’s illuminated.
- zeitgeistcowboy 3y agoI thought it was illegal to use an antenna to harvest RF energy. But, I guess not in these situations at least. All I can find from the FCC on this is https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule Can anyone comment on how these devices are legal?
- solardev 3y agoIsn't Sony Japanese? Would the FCC have any jurisdiction over them?
- iancmceachern 3y agoIf they wanted to sell product or ics into products that will be used here, then yes. But if it's only for out of US market, then no.
- solardev 3y agoMakes sense.
- iancmceachern 3y agoOf course it's perfectly legal. 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
- AuthorMdogg 3y ago> you wouldn't download electric power
- xyproto 3y agoI assume this is already being used for spying on people, since the military has the incentive and resources to stay a few years ahead of what is publicly known.
- iancmceachern 3y agoAgreed, but this could also be said for just about every other modern technology
- xyproto 3y agoAgreed, but this does not invalidate my comment?
- iancmceachern 3y agoIs there any indication of when/where/how much the modules can be purchased for?