Based on Energy Micro’s low cost starter development kit, the demonstration relies on Linear Technology’s LTC®3588 piezoelectric energy harvesting power supply and Energy Micro’s ARM® Cortex™-M3 enabled EFM32 Gecko microcontroller to create a wireless sensor node acquiring data from a 3-axis accelerometer and transmitting it over a Zigbee RF transceiver.

The energy harvested from a piezoelectric transducer is stored on a capacitor bank for later consumption by the accelerometer and radio according to the MCU’s optimized sequencing software. The EFM32 Gecko spends the majority of its time in sleep mode until woken by the LTC3588’s ‘power good’ signal. The MCU monitors energy levels at all times to ensure total circuit consumption stays below harvested energy levels.