Hardware Bits: Power Management

Welcome to Hardware Bits: A series of short articles about technologies used in the Internet of Things that you might encounter. Whether you’re a potential client, partner, a tech enthusiast, or someone who just fell down the rabbit hole, we at Spaceti want to provide you with some quick insights into Spaceti’s signature devices – our Smart Stones and Parking Gems.

Not sure what they are? You might want to check them out here first and then come back…

From the Spaceti Lab

This problem had an ingenious solution: Make the devices wireless and battery-powered. In this case, power management is one of the most important hardware elements and its ultimate goal is to save as much device’s power as possible. Why? Exchanging the batteries often is ineffective in terms of sustainability, costs and time demands. This of course affects the device’s functionalities.

“These can be optimised through design, i.e. proposing a specific functionality in a way that reduces consumption and the amount of data transferred. Even devices that react to external forces, such as touch, sound, movement, light, or any other trigger, can also be regulated according to the objectives of the solution,” says Tomáš Barták.

How to Extend Life?

We are often asked what is the life-expectancy for these devices? At Spaceti, our Stones and Gems can endure for 5-10 years without the need to exchange batteries, and even 15 years in the case of certain types of sensors.

How can we achieve that kind of long life? One of the methods of extending battery life is finding a communication module that consumes less energy. Another option is to use technologies that were originally intended for Internet of Things solutions. These are designed with low consumption in mind as well as sufficient transfer speeds and capacity. They can be found for example in Narrow Band - IoT (NB-IoT), a hot bit of tech we’ll discuss in the next edition of Hardware Bits.