Sustainable IoT Sensor Node for Energy Efficient Smart Buildings

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that is rapidly transforming physical objects, machines and infrastructure around us to be ‘smarter’ and more ‘efficient’. We have developed an ultra-low power IoT sensor node to monitor the ambient environment inside a building which can communicate to the internet. Multiple of these sensor nodes can be distributed inside a building which work together to collect real-time data and can enable to intelligently manage the building’s electrical power consumption and control the HVAC (heating and cooling) systems to achieve higher energy efficiency. Our ongoing research is focused to power these IoT sensor nodes remotely using an infrared laser beaming device. The goal is to run these IoT sensors by harvesting the energy from the laser beam making them wireless, battery less and sustainable. Our sensor nodes contain multiple sensors to accurately measure the local temperature, humidity and ambient light intensity. We have developed an energy harvesting circuit using a light sensitive diode that is integrated with the IoT sensor node housing to harvest energy from the invisible infrared laser beam. By strategically programming a wifi enabled microcontroller chip we plan to achieve an ultra-low power operation for our developed IoT sensor nodes which can run using only the energy harvested from the laser beam and without a battery. We will present our preliminary results on the performance of multiple photodiodes and solar cells as an energy receiver and multiple lasers as energy transmitters. Device design, fabrication, simulation and experimental results will be discussed