Solar-powered sensors show IoT potential
MIT engineers have combined RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags with thin-film perovskite solar cells to create energy-harvesting IoT sensors.
According to the researchers, as many as 75 billion connected devices could make up the internet of things by 2025. While vehicles, TVs and phones have their own power sources, devices further down the food chain like simple sensors will need to be able to harvest power, as regularly swapping out batteries for billions of devices will be impossible.
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“In the future, there could be billions of sensors all around us. With that scale, you’ll need a lot of batteries that you’ll have to recharge constantly,” said Sai Nithin Kantareddy, a PhD student in the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory.
“But what if you could self-power them using the ambient light? You could deploy them and forget them for months or years at a time. This work is basically building enhanced RFID tags using energy harvesters for a range of applications.”
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