(If you want to start a business off this idea feel free to contact me ;) half joking but half serious)
So yeah, I'd rather make musical instruments. If anyone wants to talk about that idea, I'm all in.
:)
Additionally, when doing research around kinetic / thermal energy harvesting technology for a wearable design project (gesture recognizing smart ring) for school, we found modules to have far too low a volumetric energy density (W/mm^3) to be useful, where size matters more than anything else.
Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as well…
Yeah, thats sort of the point. :)
Or Mod DUO:
.. can both do what you want, and a ton more to boot - I know you specifically asked for simple and cheap - well, these devices are cheap and .. amazing ..
For example, the Dualo touch uses a slider and a gyroscope for analogical input:
The voice recorded through a mic can also be a nice anological input, such as in the Rc-505 loop station:
https://www.boss.info/global/products/rc-505mk2/
Even better if there is an analogical feedback. For example with springs under buttons, rubber bands attached to finger rings or other crazy ideas.
In what areas of startup’s have you been in? More of electrons or software or something?
I build a system for an agriculture client like this with each node only having a very small solar panel (6in^2) and some super capacitors that kept it reporting data throughout the night. We even used performance metrics from the voltage being output by the solar panel to measure how cloudy it was. These devices reported via LoRa to a base station setup that was connected to a PoE system so we just ran a single Cat-6 STP line to a pole in the middle of the property.
I think the other aspect of “always on” is that the operator isn’t going to pick up the sensor years down the line. They’re just going to leave it dead and buried, especially if the sensors have to live inside the earth There’s ongoing work on harvesting electricity out of soil
That being said, it’s not the energy per se that we can tap into, it’s the gradient created as it dissipates/moves that we tap into. Heat is great, but not if it’s uniform, solar is great, but not if it harvesting it casts an area in shadow that needs it, vibration is great so long as it doesn’t damp and further load the system it’s being taken from.
I believe we are going to find these systems in our future, soon enough.
')
Don't all of these Harvesting systems load a system? For example one of the transmitters somewhere. Yes it is microwatts and no transmitter will notice a single unit. However if we start to talk large quantity of sensors, who is really paying the price? Otherwise we are admitting that Free Energy is a real thing.
You and others may find the recently released Nexperia NBM5100 and NBM7100 of interest. While aimed at batteries it functionally translates high impedance power sources to lower impedance to charge up caps for IoT usage.
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...
If it’s a train cart/carriage then not really a problem as there is so much mass and vibration to go around, if it’s the surface of a small industrial machine that needs to be reasonably balanced only producing a few hundred milli g then more of a concern.
Wouldn’t harvesting the stray noise lower the impedance of the thing being noisy, making it use more power to compensate?
It used energy-harvesting for the sensor packages, essentially charging caps if things got wet/moved/etc., but would boot up to do the sensor-data processing and communication (BLE/ANT) .. my lead on the project brought his dusty old home phone in, to give us all a stable power source, but we didn't really need it much - lots of 800mhz-900mhz in the city.
Was fun to realize, even back then, that we are literally surrounded by energy and don't really have an energy problem. We have an energy management problem, which we have yet to localize at the individual, and are instead spreading the problem across our society.
But, in between builds on this project, I would often daydream of a scenario where computing devices ran simply on background radiation, and there was no longer any need for cables, really, in order to compute.
Its fun to note we're getting closer and closer to that point. Okay, I could build a solar powered computer and also feel such satisfaction, but .. an all-in-one wafer that simply ran on cosmic noise?
Hell yeah, gimme that, sparkies!!!