Search results for 'internet of things'

Electronic stickers can turn ordinary toy blocks into high-tech sensors within the ‘internet of things.’ Credit: Purdue University image/Chi Hwan Lee

Researchers have developed a new fabrication method that makes tiny, thin-film electronic circuits peelable from a surface. The technique not only eliminates several manufacturing steps and the associated costs, but also allows any object to sense its environment or be controlled through the application of a high-tech sticker. Eventually, these stickers could also facilitate wireless communication. The researchers demonstrate capabilities on various objects in a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As society moves toward connecting all objects to the internet – even furniture and office supplies – ...

Researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) have designed a new power converter that maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 100 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a millionfold increase in current levels.

Design reduces converter’s resting power consumption by 50%. The “internet of things”, IoT is the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock will soon have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Those sensors will have to operate at very low powers, in order to extend battery life for months or make do with energy harvested from the environment...

Hybrid solar and wind harvesting cells on the top of this model house collect enough energy to light it up inside. Credit: American Chemical Society

The “Internet of Things” could make cities “smarter” by connecting an extensive network of tiny communications devices to make life more efficient. But all these machines will require a lot of energy. Rather than adding to the global reliance on fossil fuels to power the network, researchers report on a single device that harvests wind and solar energy appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Hybridized nanogenerator, including a solar cell (SC) and a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), that can individually/simultaneously scavenge solar and wind energies, which can be extensively installed on the roofs of the city buildings...

Wireless WGM sensing system.

Swapping electrons for photons, researchers have developed wireless sensors which are not subject to electromagnetic interference and are smaller and generally more flexible than the currently electronics-based technology. A team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis is the first to successfully record environmental data using a wireless photonic sensor resonator with a whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) architecture.

The photonic sensors recorded data during the spring of 2017 under two scenarios: one was a real-time measurement of air temperature over 12 hours, and the other was an aerial mapping of temperature distribution with a sensor mounted on a drone in a St. Louis city park...