IoT (Internet of Things) devices are deployed in volume to sense, measure, monitor, track… Many studies have tried to estimate the number of connected devices to be deployed in the coming years, and all end up with numbers above the billion range. Those devices are not connected to the grid and therefore rely on a battery as the source of energy. However, battery replacement causes maintenance headaches to consumers and industries. Indeed, for the consumer market the need to replace a battery lead to a poor customer experience, while for industrial applications, the number of batteries to be replaced causes high labour costs. Further the manufacturing and disposal of those batteries have a significant environmental impact: where and how to extract the row materials and how to recycle the batteries when they reach their end-of-life.
With this project we offer to solve the battery issue. An IoT device is built around four different functions: A sensor that gather information about the object environment, a microcontroller that process this information, a communication mean that send the results of the processing to the cloud and a power management that delivers energy to the object. At e-peas we already offer power management circuits that can be combined with tiny energy harvesters to supply the object from the energy available from its environment. The goal of this project is to combine it with a microcontroller and a sensor (namely an image sensor) that will require a minimum amount of power to operate. This combination will provide energy autonomy to the objects, removing the burden of battery replacement.
