AdaptivEnergy, GainSpan to develop energy tech

LONDON, UK: AdaptivEnergy, the energy-harvesting company based in Virginia, US, and GainSpan Corporation, the developer of Wi-Fi sensor network technology, headquartered in San Jose, California, the United States, have singed an agreement to work jointly in the field of technology development.

That apart, both firms have received investment from and have entered into a pact on strategic technology development with In-Q-Tel, the independent, strategic investment arm of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In a joint statement, AdaptivEnergy and GainSpan said they will conduct demonstrations of Wi-Fi sensor nodes that are powered by energy-harvesting technology.

In one of such demonstrations, a temperature-and-light sensor node that uses GainSpan Corporation’s technology will be powered by the Joule-Thief module, developed by AdaptivEnergy. The sensor node will first send data on light and temperature through standard Wi-Fi access point and then on to a Web-hosted application. The process will only use energy that is generated from a vibration of less than 0.040 grms.

AdaptivEnergy said it has obtained integrated thermo-generator technology from Micropelt GmbH, based in Freiburg, Germany, in order to power the WiFi sensor node of GainSpan Corporation, EETimes has reported

The Joule-Thief module of AdaptivEnergy can make use of almost any kind of movement – like, for example, the motion of a person walking, the flowing water or air, or even a door opening and closing – to generate as well as store electricity.

The GS1010 system-on-chip of GainSpan Corporation includes an 802.11 radio, baseband processor, media access controller, SRAM, on-chip flash memory, plus a single-package applications processor.