Stephen TranovichCool, let's get rolling! This hack chat is going to be more of a community discussion around Prize entries, unique ways of energy harvesting, and anything else about the Prize.
It's kind of a neat way to do power and communication. I've seen some groups that send data over the headphone jack as well.
OK, then can you tell us why was Power Harvesting chosen as one of the categories?
I spend a lot of my days running logistics for the prize and talking with individuals about how to get their entries to be epic. So I'm excited to answer any questions!
How are prize categories for the year created? Is there any community input on, say, 'categories for 2019'?
@Kris Winer Yes, the Power Harvesting Module Challenge was chosen because energy consumption is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity at the moment.
This is an area electrical engineers and makers can really use our skills to aid with
there should be a "ironic man" achievement for energy-saving achievements being sold for bitcoin :D
I think the vast majority of power harvesting entries might focus on solar energy and thermal electric generators. These have somewhat been exhausted in the DIY community, to some extent. I'm interested to see what new things people come up with. I think something that hasn't been quite tapped into is using people's sweat to make a battery and power some sort of wearable.
s/projects/achievements
just my two cents anyways
We specifically chose modules because we wanted projects to focus on design pieces that can be used in a variety of applications moving forward. Hopefully these projects can be used in future projects that may have otherwise been powered with traditional means
LOL @ðeshipu way too real
I'm looking forward to seeing some of the more innovative ideas; my project is just using an off-the-shelf IC to harvest power from a solar cell. The small sized form factor is unique but it isn't something anyone else couldn't do...
What are you powering? @Kris Winer if you don't mind sharing
It's kind of hilarious that the new alternative currency (crypto) is actually directly adding to energy pollution rather han indirectly
"but it isn't something anyone else couldn't do" sounds like a good design
don't know if it helps with energy consumption. Millions of micropower devices need as much power as one air conditioner
the bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm is outdated, people should use more modern coins, like Waves with proof-of-stake
I have designed a bunch of different kinds of environmental sensors using either wifi, BLE or LoRa and combinations thereof. wifi is nearly impossible to power with a solar cell. BLE is the best match here. LoRa is so power efficient is doesn't really need power harvesting.
Plus where I am, I get ~6 hours of direct sun a day, so with a small solar cell that is ~40 mA per day, this is the power budget for any kind of remote sensor device arounf my house.
Unless you wanted to power LoRa with a pushbutton or piezoelectrics triggered by rain. Batteryless electronics is really interesting.
in most of EU you can use the rainwater with two electrodes as a battery :P
I am so excited about more unique and ingenious methods of power harvesting,. That is what I really want to see - ways of taking power from unlikely places and being used.
I thought about a wind powered harvester, but this is pretty hard and large being mechanical. I would like to find a non-moving way to harvest wind power... This would be interesting especially if the device could remain very small.
lol
What are some untapped energy sources you would all like to see or build from?
Sweat
And...sorry to gross people out...human waste. Sorry. Biology person here.
Might be possible to do this with a piezo crystal in the shape of a longish paddle, but I suspect the amount of power available from wind using this method would be very small. LoRa sensor nodes use 40 uA, so one would need to generate ~1 mA per day...
No, I'm so for it. Sweat would be so cool to harvest power from
Trees
@richard trees? How so?
https://www.livescience.com/5711-electricity-harvested-trees.html
Electricity Harvested From Trees
Researchers have figured out a way to plug into the power generated by trees. Scientists have known for some time that plants can conduct electricity. In fact, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants can pack up to 200 millivolts of electrical power. A millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt.
Some soil monitoring devices are powered from the soil itself. I assume that this is probably about the same thing.
Wow, that is epic
I was thinking about an LED wearable project that is powered from the ambient power of AC wall lines.
If we stack people on top of each other we can make a really large antenna.
Well...stand on each other's shoulders
Does that count as bio-tech?
I think that counts as bio-tech.
Lol. It better.
you would have to be pretty close to the AC line to get anything useful from it I think
Yeah, I haven't done the measurements yet, but I imagine it'd only light up when you're pretty much leaning against the wall.
But on a serious note, I've somewhat powered an LED with a BJT doing this before. I touched the the base with my finger. The collector was still connected to a battery though, but just mains coupling through me was enough to get some base current and to light up an LED.
I was really surprised by it, but thought it was kinda cool too.
Wow, that is really cool!
you might have some luck harvesting energy from ambient WiFi RF energy
@richard a few companies do this. The issue is that people always want more power than they can harvest. (Of course). I think the general range is somewhere around 20uW for ambient RF energy harvesting.
Let me find a link. (Frantically crushing Google)
There are some projects trying to get energy from atmospheric electricity. Natural field strength is 100V / m, but of course, not much current. And you might get a little bit too much energy when lightning hits your construction.
For wearable thermoelectric (from body heat) seems promising but again this is only for ultra-low power devices.
technology | ubeam
With pioneering ultrasound technology, uBeam creates an aura of safe, wireless energy that charges your personal devices, keeping them all in perfect orbit. We are building the energy infrastructure of the future, helping us all cut the cords once and for all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rVdEhyMR6A
Most IoT applications that don't use WiFi don't need much power. Just enough to wake up send a reading then sleep again.
@Orlando Hoilett interesting... using Ultrasound I don't think I've seen that one before... must be very directional though
LoRa nodesuse ~1 mA per day, BLE nodes ~5 -10 mA per day, wifi ~100 mA per day, all depends on duty cycle though.
it is not feasible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dqzVlhFkA
Yeah they're working on trying to dynamically adjust the direction of the ultrasound waves based on where the load is relative to the emitter
@Frank Buss it's definitely not feasible for charging phones. I agree.
This goes back to what I said before, people want more power than can feasibly be harvested. Charging phones. Not so much. Remote low power sensors. Fair game.
In my mind, the issue would be making devices lower power. How could we take the devices we use on a regular basis and make them use as little power as possible. That would make some of these harvesting techniques more interesting.
currently we are well above the Landauer limit for microcontrollers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
That totally applies for the power harvesting challenge I'd say. Making existing devices lower power is definitely in line with the mission of the challenge.
Or to be powered by the system that's measuring (or surroundings). The soil powered soil monitoring devices come to mind. Making something that more widespread would be kind of neat.
@Stephen Tranovich cool deal. Sounds like a good direction.
and if we would use reversible logic computing, we could theoretically reach near zero energy consumption
Hi, I found some papers about the soil and other microbes if anyone is interested!
e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775317304159
It's the sensors and connectivity of remote devices that consume the power, typical MCU in low power mode uses 2 uA, not much point getting below that when radios and sensors use 100's of uA.
true
Passive sensors are low power.
What is an example of a passive sensor?
RTDs
Resistors? They don;t use power?
depends on the voltage :-)
Depends on how you look at "powered" I guess.
current x voltage
I power an op amp (active component). I don't power a resistor (passive component). Going back to Linear Circuit I.
@Kris Winer fair enough.
@Neil K. Sheridan Cool, microbe power! Checking out the paper now
and you don't need to power it all the time, you can measure the temperature once an hour, power it for some milliseconds every hour
Yes, this is standard ultra-low-power management tecjnique, also useful for active sensors ;>
It's actually quite a challenge to minimize power consumtion for a given design and still get full functionality. Maybe Hackaday.io could sponsor a prize category for a fixed device and the winner would design the firmware to use the least power while still being fully functional...
A while back @ziggurat29 asked how people can suggest challenges for next year. We don't have an official process yet, but it'd be awesome to hear what challenges you'd all like to see!
The coin cell challenge was sort of like that.
It wasn't quite, how low power you can get, but what can you do with a coin cell.
Missed it...
https://hackaday.io/contest/28283-coin-cell-challenge
Coin Cell Challenge
Low power is where it's at. It's the future of technology. Do something cool with a single coin cell.
once I did a fully functional project, which needed only 13.3 nA @ 3.3V: https://hackaday.io/project/27471-monoflop
That's super ultra-low power! Impressive!
@Stephen Tranovich In one experiment they got "power density generated by the isolates in the MFCs [microbial fuel cells] ranged from 16.4 to 28.6 mW m-2". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5099896/ there are certain bacteria which are best and they seem to like anaerobic conditions..
of course, it didn't do very much :-)
Well that's the hard part of such a challenge, fixed hardware and a fixed set of (useful) tasks at the lowest power; maybe hard to design a proper challenge like this.
but SRAM is retained, so could be used as a super low power counter
Maybe a fixed set of tasks and completely open choice for hardware, judging on completeness of tasks accomplished and the lowest power to do so?
That would be cool.
I think so...when do we start!
I've been thinking about having something like that for a bit. Not sure if/when that can get implemented though!
In the meantime, what do you most want to power?
Powering something impressive without traditional or solar or thermal energy is an interesting challenge
If I have time I want to do a nitrate sea life powered electric generator, high salinity and using sunlight / photosynthesis , basically a living battery
yeessssssss
I want to power my projects with my fish tank!
I like powering remote, connected (wifi, ble, LoRa) sensor nodes.
since the ocean is mostly salt based this could be done on a larger scale i think
i think i will try it with fresh water though, we will see what i can get going, it takes a few days to grow algea
How does salinity and photosynthesis make a battery/
One last thing I want to mention is that I'm collecting videos and information from Prize entries to help promote them online via social media and highlight videos for youtube, etc. If you want your project to be featured, fill out this form! https://goo.gl/forms/A8GNqg60xzmESNlp2
Thanks for sharing all your ideas about power harvesting!
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