Voltaic spoke with Olivier Bloch from the IoT Show and Björn Rosqvist from Qoitech about harvesting ambient energy and the future of powering IoT devices. Voltaic Systems designs small solar panels for high volume outdoor, industrial applications including asset tracking environmental monitoring.
There were a few key points from the show:
- The technologies to harvest and store energy from the sun and other light and energy sources are well established and deployed at scale
- Energy harvesting can reduce costs and wastes by greatly driving down battery replacement costs (both hardware and labor)
- Using tools such as Qoitech’s Otii Ace can help developers drive down device energy consumption, leading to lower BOMs and higher uptimes
- Power production in energy harvesting applications is probabalistic – we don’t have estimates but certainty on how much energy will be available in different environments
- Designing an energy harvesting device is a systems problem and requires coordination across mechanical, electrical and software teams
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