E
MBEDDED
W
IRELESS
batteries directly from the solar cell. In the
few applications where the source of energy
is constant, there may be no need for storage.
The main advantage of using energy harvesting
in low-power wireless sensor nodes is not an
immediate reduction in the cost per unit, but
the long-term savings in maintenance costs.
These savings are particularly useful if the sen-
sor nodes are in remote locations, or if the net-
work contains a high number of nodes. In both
of these scenarios, energy harvesting could
power the wireless sensors almost indefinitely
and with virtually no human intervention.
Energy harvesting is becoming an increasingly
viable solution for powering wireless sensor
nodes particularly in networks which are not
based on networking standards such as Zig-
Bee or WiFi. There is also a growing range of
energy sources such as light, heat, radio waves,
mechanical energy, and, more recently, even
blood sugar. The successful implementation
of energy harvesting to power a wireless sen-
sor node needs careful control of the wire-
less sensor’s overall power draw. This can be
achieved by selecting the most appropriate
communication protocol and data rate, and
by using all the power-saving features inte-
grated into RF devices such as the Microchip
PIC12LF1840T48A microcontroller.
Artila cooperates with Nietzsche
Enterprise in wireless automation
ZigBee is a low-cost, low-power, wireless
mesh network standard targeted at wide
deployment of long battery life devices in
wireless control and monitoring applications.
Thanks to its powerful star, tree networks,
and generic Mesh networking support,
ZigBee had been widely used in building
automation, lightning control, energy man-
agement and security. Artila announces the
cooperation with Nietzsche in wireless auto-
mation of the environment monitoring and
safety alert.
Telit expands m2mAIR mobile coverage
across Europe and Latin America
Telit Wireless Solutions announced its
appointment to the Telefonica m2m Chan-
nel Partner Programme. As a result, m2mAIR
Mobile can now offer local Telefonica con-
nectivity services, together with its own suite
of value added services to M2M customers
throughout Europe and Latin America.
GreenPeak: smart home chips support
new networking protocols like Thread
GreenPeak is pleased to recognize Thread’s
entry in the family of protocols based on the
IEEE 802.15.4 standard. GreenPeak’s family
of patented multi-stack low-power radio
chips has been developed to simultaneously
support different wireless networking pro-
tocols. The family of GP71x chips today
supports ZigBee PRO, SEP 2.0, RF4CE and
Green Power, and is capable of supporting
new and emerging protocols such as the
recently announced protocol by the Thread
Group, allowing customers to upgrade their
devices to support existing protocols for
legacy devices as well as newer devices run-
ning Thread at the same time.
Product News
