Energy Independent Wireless Sensor Network Design

Battery powered wireless sensor nodes (WSN) are rarely efficient from the point of view of life time, development and maintenance cost. In this context, energy harvesting techniques are used more and more, coupled with super capacitors, in order to mitigate the costs and increase the lifetime. This paper presents the results of powering Sparrow v3, a wireless sensor node, from super capacitors charged by a solar panel. The experimental results show that this system may operate in an autonomous mode, using only the power provided by the photovoltaic cells. The novelty of this setup is represented by its small solar panel, combined with super capacitors which have a smaller capacity than other similar systems. A highly optimized code had to be implemented in order to achieve the energy autonomy goal.