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Is it sensible to power indoor battery sensors with harvested energy?

Is it sensible to power indoor battery sensors with harvested energy?

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Hi, I normally do data analysis on the water side, hardware is not my main job, so forgive me if this is a silly question.I have 4 ESP32 + BME280 nodes at home, each sending temperature, humidity and battery_v to Hermetry over HTTPS every 10 minutes. They only last 5-6 weeks on 2x AA and I’m tired of changing batteries. I’ve been thinking: one is by the window, one next to the radiator, and one on top of the washing machine (lots of vibration 🙂).Would a small solar panel, or a TEG on the radiator or a vibration harvester, actually power these nodes? Or am I wasting my time? Looking at the battery_v graph on the dashboard, it drops by about 25 mV per day. I don’t know the measured average current, but the Wi-Fi connection part takes a long time, each transmission takes ~3.2 s in the serial log.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

I don’t know about the hardware side, but instead of sending a separate POST every 10 minutes, how about collecting the readings and sending them as a series once an hour? Hermetry accepts a series of records with ts in a single message, and for quota purposes it also counts as one message.

Sahadan selamlar.
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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

The clock is not synchronised, but I don’t use NTP at all. I read somewhere that making up ts values is forbidden.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Honestly, we have never tried harvesting on our site. We deploy LoRaWAN battery sensors and they last 5-6 years. Wi-Fi + TLS is expensive on every wake-up, so the problem is in front of harvesting, in my opinion.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

In the factory we tried a vibration energy harvester on the compressor line, but the price per device came out higher than the sensor itself, so it was shelved. Besides, the washing machine already runs 1-2 hours a day.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Last semester we measured exactly this in our capstone project, rough figures are as follows:Your cycle: 3.2 s × average ~110 mA × 3.3 V ≈ 1.1 J per transmission. At one transmission every 10 minutes → average ~2 mW, plus the deep sleep current. An indoor 10 cm² panel away from the window gives 50-200 µW, so it is 10 times too little. A small 0.5 W panel with direct sunlight through a window + supercapacitor + a harvesting IC such as BQ25570 is enough even in winter. A TEG attached to the radiator gives a few mW at a 20-30 K difference, but in summer the heating is off, and as Gizem Hanım said, forget about vibration.The real gain is in the number of transmissions. After waking up, do NTP (you are connected to Wi-Fi anyway), collect the readings in RTC memory and send a single POST once an hour:

[{"ts":1793000000000,"values":{"temperature":21.4,"humidity":44}},
 {"ts":1793000600000,"values":{"temperature":21.5,"humidity":44}}]

If there is no clock, leave out ts; the send time is then stamped. Also send the supercapacitor voltage as supercap_v, and you will see from the graph which node is sufficient.

Accepted solution♥ 2

Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

The calculation clarified things a lot, thanks. I built the one by the window with a 0.5 W panel + 1 F supercap + BQ25570, it’s been two weeks without a battery, supercap_v doesn’t drop below 3.9 at night. On the others I switched to NTP + hourly batch sending, and the slope of battery_v fell from 25 mV per day to 6 mV per day. I buried the idea of the beehive and the washing machine 🙂

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