Energy Harvesting for Enthusiasts

Anyone who likes the idea of something for nothing has to be interested in energy harvesting, getting the energy to avoid reliance on traditional energy sources such as batteries, for free – once the initial hardware investment has been made. Today, in addition to solar, wind and falling or flowing water, vibration, RF, heat and other techniques are powering many products, especially sensor-based applications.

For industrial applications, one of the more intriguing energy harvesting techniques involves vibration. In a factory environment, the movement of rotating equipment provides a constant vibration source. A carefully designed system can use this low level of vibration and a piezoelectric energy harvesting transducer to power a sensor and its associated circuitry. Without the need to charge or replace a battery, the sensor can provide low maintenance feedback regarding the normal or abnormal operation of equipment for fault monitoring and downtime prevention. Several companies are involved in the development of the energy harvesting devices as well as other critical components in the ultra-low power consuming sensor circuits.

Those who are interested in more information may want to check out the Power Management: Energy Harvesting & Storage symposium (http://www.sensorsexpo.com/pre-conference-symposia/symposium-3-power-management-energy-harvesting-storage) at Sensors Expo, June 7 in Chicago, IL

MicroStrain® Wins Silver and Gold at Sensors Expo

Williston, VT – MicroStrain won two more “Best of Sensors Expo” awards at Sensors Expo in Rosemont, IL. These Gold and Silver awards bring MicroStrain’s total to ten Gold awards and two Silver awards, accumulated over the last eight years.

^{Steve Arms, President of MicroStrain (right) and Mike Robinson, VP Sales and Marketing accept awards}

This year’s gold award was for HS-Link™ three channel High Speed Wireless Node with sample rates up to 100 kHz on all three channels. During user definable sampling sessions, HS-LINK™ stores bursts of data in a buffer; once sampling is complete data are then transferred to non-volatile flash memory. Each sensor channel has a dedicated 16 bit analog to digital converter (A/D) enabling the three distinct sensor inputs to be sampled simultaneously. HS-LINK™ also features a precision timekeeper, which can receive a high priority timing beacon, which enables multiple HS-Links™ in a star network to achieve a node-to-node data sampling synchronization of ±4 microseconds.

The silver award was for 3DM-GX3™-25, Miniature Attitude Heading Reference System. 3DM-GX3™-25 is amongst the smallest and lightest AHRS on the market today, with versions weighing as little as 11.5 grams. Improved performance in the face of ambient vibrations and oscillations is achieved by oversampling at 30 KHz and then digitally filtering and performing coning and sculling integrals at 1 kHz. Oversampling also greatly improves the resolution of the sensor readings. User adjustable output rates of up to 1000 Hz make the 3DM-GX3™-25 AHRS one of the fastest attitude heading reference systems available today. Each 3DM-GX3™-25 is individually calibrated to compensate for gyro g-sensitivity and sensor misalignment and includes routines for hard and soft iron field calibrations. Full temperature compensation ensures performance over a wide operating temperature range.

MicroStrain
www.microstrain.com