

Energy harvesting chips: The next big thing for a connected world - WardPlunet
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/21/energy-harvesting-chips-the-next-big-thing-for-a-connected-world/

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Ellipsis753
I really like the idea of these. Particularly the idea of getting energy from
radio waves or Wifi. Sadly it's really had to find much about how to make such
designs and the power that can be generated is really low (and hard to store).
There are some nice items for generating from heat and other small sources
(such as radio waves) but they're generally far too expensive for any
practical projects.

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Retric
There is a lot of info out there on this stuff. I would suggest talking to an
EE as a friend of mine was all over this 10 years ago and I suspect the field
has only gotten more refined with time.

From what I recall, storage is often the key to making these things really
useful. Take say a temperature reading every minute store 60 of them and burst
that data once an hour and you need a lot less power than you might think.
Granted, that kind of lag is not so useful for critical operations, but for
say monitoring a bridge it's a good fit.

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arbuge
I'll believe it when I see it. Energy harvesting chips were also the next big
thing when I finished grad school in chip design. That was back in 2000.

