Concluding this four-part series highlighting experts who were out in Hardware Pioneers at full force to discuss innovation and more, IoT Insider had the chance to speak with Björn Rosqvist, Chief Product Officer at Qoitech about the importance of optimising power consumption using tools.
A highlight of the show for Qoitech was showcasing their Otii Product Suite, a tool which Rosqvist outlined was typically used by customers who are looking to extend the battery life powering their wireless IoT devices and would like to measure the power consumption to understand how this can be improved.
“Our tool helps the developer to see how the device consumes energy, because we offer powering and measuring capabilities at the same time with accurate measurements,” he explained. This accuracy is imperative for IoT devices with low sleep currents.
“It’s not only important to optimise the hardware but to optimise the software, too,” added Rosqvist. “To understand how the software affects the power consumption, you can also sync the measurements with the debug log, or the debug log via UART.”
Although the typical use case is optimising the power consumption of battery-powered IoT devices, Rosqvist explained that anything that needs to be powered, should be optimised: “It doesn’t need to be an IoT device, it doesn’t need to be battery powered; it could be powered by the mains as well.”
With the way that battery power works, there is a “specific amount of energy,” Rosqvist said, “and after that energy is spent, you either need to replace the battery, and that could be very costly for the integrator, or you need to recharge it … The batteries will then add on a layer of difficulty, that’s why we help the developers with this.”
Optimising power consumption saves costs, while failing to interrogate the battery aspect when designing a device, such as a sensor, and resulting in a short battery life, “could kill the total business,” he stressed, “because then you need someone to go out and replace the batteries.” The arguable expectation for sensors operating out in the field is for the battery life to last 10+ years, without requiring somebody to go out and replace the battery regularly.
“And on top of that, you get a lot of waste,” Rosqvist added. “The deployment cost and maintenance costs, maybe they [companies] don’t think about that in the development part. But if you do, and this results in long battery life, then the maintenance costs will be lower and it will be a win for the total business.”
When asked whether he thought it was becoming more commonplace to be testing factors like power consumption during the development of a product, Rosqvist’s answer was clear: “Absolutely.” He noted that previously, hardware, software and optimisation teams work separately during development. “But now it should be that every individual who is part of the development, should be responsible for their power consumption.”
“Regardless if you’re a hardware developer, or firmware developer, or a higher level software developer, you should all be responsible for meeting the power requirements.”
On what Qoitech has in store for the future, Rosqvist said that they were focusing on energy harvesting. “It has been around for quite some time and we see some devices that implement energy harvesting. We will help the developers with this by implementing our energy harvester toolbox.”
“I love working in the IoT industry because so many different things are happening at once – one day, we’re working with energy harvesters – another day, we’re working with batteries,” concluded Rosqvist.
This is part four of a four-part series. To read part one, click here, part two, here and part three, here.
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