Last week e-peas teamed up with Silicon Labs in a first reveal of e-peas’ and Silabs’ new Explorer Kit. In the video, both companies showcased how smart building, asset tracking and factory automation device OEMs can simply and cost effectively develop battery-less ambient IoT systems.
This marks the first unboxing of the new AEM13920 and AEM00300 dedicated energy harvesting shields, running together within Silicon Labs’ new Explorer Kit (featuring EFR32xMG22e) with an ultra-fast cold start and highly energy-efficient deep sleep mode. This Explorer Kit allows the use of multiple energy harvesting sources for increased flexibility and powering reliably Ambient IoT systems.
The video presents a guide for developers, offering demonstrations, best practices, and system-level efficiency insights. Registered viewers will also be given access to a GitHub software and documentation repository to simplify and speed up design of battery-free, self-sustaining IoT devices.
“The need for OEMs to move away from batteries to the Ambient IoT is becoming urgent,” said Bruno Damien, Ecosystem Marketing Director, e-peas. “Consumers and facility managers are becoming acutely aware of the cost of maintaining these devices and the environmental impact of discarded batteries, too. But there is a knowledge gap when it comes to implementation, and we’re delighted to have partnered with Silicon Labs to help address this.”
The AEM13920 shield has been designed to manage power from multiple continuous and intermittent sources, including photovoltaic, thermal, RF, inductive, and piezoelectric systems. It delivers a 90% energy-transfer efficiency and is compatible with powering Bluetooth, Zigbee, and custom protocols from Silicon Labs. It also implements a programmable output voltage. Storage elements associated with the kit can store up to 1,000J for a more stable and reliable power supply.
The shield has been designed to cope with random pulsed energy of a few hundred microjoules without compromising on energy efficiency. It achieves this by building on a smart architecture designed to store this unpredictable pulse of energy and give a stabilised delivery to the application.
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