AdaptivEnergy, GainSpan link on energy harvesting Wi-Fi nodes

LONDON &$151; Energy harvesting company AdaptivEnergy Inc. (Hampton Roads, Va.) and GainSpan Corp. (San Jose, Calif.), a developer of Wi-Fi sensor network technology, have entered into a technology development partnership. And both GainSpan and AdaptivEnergy have received investment and entered into strategic technology development agreements with In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The companies are planning demonstrations of Wi-Fi sensor nodes powered by energy harvesting technology.

In one demonstration, a temperature and light sensor node using GainSpan's technology will be powered by AdaptivEnergy's Joule-Thief module. The sensor node will send temperature and light data through standard Wi-Fi access point and on to a web-hosted application, using as the only power source the energy generated from a vibration of less than 0.040 grms, AdaptivEnergy said

AdaptivEnergy has integrated thermo-generator technology from Micropelt GmbH (Freiburg, Germany) to power a GainSpan WiFi sensor node.

AdaptivEnergy's Joule-Thief can use any movement, from the motion of a personal walking, flowing air or water, or even a door opening and closing to create and store electricity. GainSpan's GS1010 system-on-chip contains an 802.11 radio, media access controller, baseband processor, on-chip flash memory, SRAM, and an applications processor in a single package.

"The ultra low power nature of GainSpan products opens up considerable new opportunities for battery-less autonomous intelligent sensor networks while also adding significant flexibility and functionality to our energy harvesting solutions," said Jim Vogeley, CEO of AdaptivEnergy, in a statement.

"This demonstration is a very promising step towards availability of battery-less Wi-Fi sensor devices, and the progress made in energy harvesting and low power Wi-Fi opens a lot of opportunities for devices to track location and monitor the health of people and condition of assets," said Bernard Aboussouan, vice president of marketing at GainSpan, in the same statement.

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