Peter Woodman leads sales engineering, solution design, and training at Everactive, and is a leading advocate for battery-less sensing in the industrial internet of things. During the live Q&A portion of the webinar, "How to Overcome the IoT's Battery Problem for Maintenance and Reliability," Woodman tackled several attendee questions on the advantages of self-powered IoT devices.
PS: Since Everactive sensors do not use batteries, does that mean that data is only transmitted sporadically?
PW: The answer is no. We don't use batteries because batteries fail. There's a limited number of charge cycles. They lose their hot top capacity first, like your cell phone battery. After a couple of years, you don't get as much out of it. Then eventually the battery will fail entirely and won’t work at all.
We do use capacitors on our devices. The difference is that capacitors are much simpler devices that don't wear out in the same way. We can store some energy. For example, if you have a process that goes up and down, instead of just transmitting sporadically, we can store energy and then use that capacitor to run through the night.
While we're running, we do transmit continuously. But even if we don't have any energy present for some reason, we can run off that capacitor and continually transmit.
