A collaboration between Powercast and Asset Vue on creating a battery-free sensor condition monitoring system for data centres demonstrated the growth in battery-free applications and flexed the company’s custom product manufacturing services – which Eric Biel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at the company had discussed with IoT Insider before.
Expertise in wireless power
The growth in battery-free applications has presented Powercast with prime opportunities, for a company first founded in 2003, and Biel’s earlier discussion with IoT Insider centered on its introduction of magnetic resonance for wireless charging as part of its portfolio at CES 2025. It also has RF and inductive power.
Its focus has been on becoming “a one-stop shop”, expanding the number of applications it serves. Having magnetic resonance as part of its portfolio will cover consumer devices like Bluetooth speakers and computer monitors.
This time, Biel was here to talk about the collaboration with Asset Vue, which oversaw the creation of a battery-free condition monitoring system for the company.
Powercast’s core expertise is in wireless power; offering RFID sensor tags that are powered through energy harvesting RF signals emitted by RAIN RFID readers, getting rid of the need for batteries.
“Powercast’s Powerharvester PCCC110 receiver chip embedded in the RFID sensor tags harvests RF energy sent over the air from any RFID reader within range, which can be up to 40 metres,” said Biel. “The Powerharvester chip converts the RF energy to usable DC to power the tags.
“A microcontroller and sensors receive power, measure conditions, and report that data back to the reader through a traditional RFID tag.”
Powercast took its wirelessly-powered, RFID sensor monitoring system and adapted it accordingly to meet Asset Vue’s needs.
What were those needs?
“They needed 1) precise monitoring of extreme temperature and humidity to prevent failure of mission-critical equipment they store on metal server tracks, 2) the ability to quickly locate tagged items on those crowded server racks, and 3) all without adding to the complexity or expense of their data centre,” said Biel.
Although data centre applications are a new area for Powercast, Biel noted, it will continue to work with Asset Vue on future solutions for the data centre environment.
Product customisation
The customisation came into play taking stock of these requirements. Besides the need for precise monitoring of mission-critical equipment to ensure temperature or humidity don’t reach levels that could cause failure, the metal server racks added complexity.
As Biel explained it: “Metal is known to diminish an RF signal, so we had to figure out how to adjust our RFID sensor tags to perform in a metal-filled data centre environment.”
Powercast halved the size of its RFID tags to fit the server racks and facilitate more airflow, “from 108mm x 57.15mm x 6.35mm to 69.85mm x 44.45mm x 6.35mm”.
It also redesigned the RF receiving antenna to avoid the interference from the metal server racks while being able to provide long-range wireless power to the sensors.
Because data centres are already equipped with standard RFID readers, Powercast’s RFID sensor tags were able to harvest RF energy from these readers, “a data centre environment lends itself to our maintenance-free RFID sensor monitoring system,” added Biel.
This means that data centre operators can eliminate the costs associated with hard wired sensors, as Powercast’s wireless RFID tags harvests enough energy from these readers to continue operating.
“A single RFID reader can power many tags at once located over a large area as long as they’re within range,” said Biel.
Looking forward
Experiencing growing demand for maintenance-free wireless monitoring systems reflects a broader trend of demand for sustainable solutions as companies put their operations under a microscope – and for some, batteries aren’t part of this goal.
“Our solution aims to enable real-time smart monitoring that results in smarter supply chains capable of locating live shipments, tracking the state of perishable goods and more, all without wires and batteries,” concluded Biel. “We have a large engineering, design and productisation team which for years has custom built solutions tailored to clients’ specific requirements for their application.”
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