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Computing Research Repository, November 2018

Pible: Battery-Free Mote for Perpetual Indoor BLE Applications

A battery-free BLE sensor node that harvests indoor light into a super-capacitor and adapts its sensing rate to run perpetually.

Francesco Fraternali, Bharathan Balaji, Yuvraj Agarwal, Luca Benini, Rajesh Gupta
Computing Research Repository, November 2018
Paper
The Pible board with its solar panel, PIR sensor, CC2650 BLE module, energy management circuit, and super-capacitor, shown beside its 3D-printed enclosure and a coin.
The Pible board with its solar panel, PIR sensor, CC2650 BLE module, energy management circuit, and super-capacitor, shown beside its 3D-printed enclosure and a coin.

Abstract

Smart building applications require a large-scale deployment of sensors distributed across the environment. Recent innovations in smart environments are driven by wireless networked sensors as they are easy to deploy. However, replacing these batteries at scale is a non-trivial, labor-intensive task. Energy harvesting has emerged as a potential solution to avoid battery replacement but requires compromises such as application specific design, simplified communication protocol or reduced quality of service. We explore the design space of battery-free sensor nodes using commercial off the shelf components, and present Pible: a Perpetual Indoor BLE sensor node that leverages ambient light and can support numerous smart building applications. We analyze node-lifetime, quality of service and light availability trade-offs and present a predictive algorithm that adapts to changing lighting conditions to maximize node lifetime and application quality of service. Using a 20 node, 15-day deployment in a real building under varying lighting conditions, we show feasible applications that can be implemented using Pible and the boundary conditions under which they can fail.

Bibtex

Bibtex

@article{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1812-04717,
  author    = {Francesco Fraternali and
               Bharathan Balaji and
               Yuvraj Agarwal and
               Luca Benini and
               Rajesh E. Gupta},
  title     = {Pible: Battery-Free Mote for Perpetual Indoor {BLE} Applications},
  journal   = {CoRR},
  volume    = {abs/1812.04717},
  year      = {2018},
  url       = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04717},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint    = {1812.04717},
  timestamp = {Tue, 01 Jan 2019 15:01:25 +0100},
  biburl    = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/journals/corr/abs-1812-04717},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}

Plain Text

Fraternali, Francesco, Bharathan Balaji, Yuvraj Agarwal, Luca Benini and Rajesh Gupta. “Pible: Battery-Free Mote for Perpetual Indoor BLE Applications.” (2018) ArXiv, abs/1812.04717.