Design Support for Energy Harvesting Driven IoT Devices

With the emerging Internet of Things, wireless sensor applications are increasingly being supplied from energy harvesting. While this shift away from batteries provides many advantages, it also increases the complexity of designing these highly energy constrained systems. Due to environmental dependencies, novel tools are necessary to support their design process. With the RocketLogger we introduce a measurement tool that addresses the specific needs of energy harvesting systems. It provides a highly increased dynamic range for current measurements, accommodating both ultra-low sleep currents of few nanoamperes as well as wireless communication currents in the range of hundreds of milliamperes. The portable design allows for in-situ measurements for characterizing and validating the system performance, while an extensible sensor bus provides flexible recording of the application specific environmental variables from which the energy is extracted. While the RocketLogger is an important first step, additional tools are still required to provide the necessary support for designing efficient and reliable harvesting-driven systems.