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BFree: Battery-Free Prototyping Platform

PI: Przemysław Pawełczak, TU Delft

Researchers: Vito Kortbeek (TU Delft), Abu Bakar (Northwestern University, USA), Stefany Cruz (Northwestern University, USA), Kasim Sinan Yildirim (University of Trento, Italy), Przemysław Pawełczak (TU Delft), Josiah Hester (Northwestern University, USA)

The battery-free (BFree) prototyping platform allows unskilled electronic hobbyists to prototype, in easy-accessible Python programming language, systems that are battery-free while harvesting energy from the ambient sources.

Video

Abstract

BFree is a hardware-software system enabling intermittent computing applications (i.e. computing that is accurate and makes progress despite power interrupts) for Adafruit Metro M0 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3505) hobbyist-grade embedded platform that is (a) battery-free (i.e. energy is stored in a less-polluting and better maintainable capacitor, instead of a battery) and (b) powered from renewable energy sources. Power interrupts are the result of insatiable energy coming from energy harvesting sources, such as vibrations or solar power. Programs for such intermittency-protected Adafruit Metro M0 boards are written in a regular CircuitPython language. This means that the end user does not need to learn any domain-specific programming language. BFree (in the background) takes care of saving intermediate program state to a non-volatile memory of the BFree shield (i.e. red PCB shown in the photo above) and restores the program state (when the harvested power is again available) from the last moment the system lost power from insufficient harvested energy.

Vito Kortbeek, Abu Bakar, Stefany Cruz, Kasim Sinan Yildirim, Przemysław Pawełczak, Josiah Hester, BFree: Enabling Battery-Free Sensor Prototyping with Python, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 4, Issue 4, December 2020 and Proceedings of ACM UbiComp 2021

Press Release:

Acknowledgments

This project was partially supported by the 4TU.NIRICT community funding.