Energy Harvesting Measurement Demo in Processing

This is a demo of a self-powered wireless measurement device I codeveloped at work, under a Federal Railroad Administration contract. Each unit measures the brake force at each railcar brake beam and transmits the data via mesh network. The system is powered by the vibration of the railcar, which maintains a small rechargeable battery inside. In this case, the data is picked up by a laptop via USB radio dongle.

The brake beam is represented here by a small, instrumented flat beam for benchtop demo. As force is applied to the scale model, the finite-element model onscreen (generated in Solidworks and pre-cached) is updated to reflect the force distribution on the full-size beam. The graphical demo and radio interface code is written in Processing (processing.org) and interfaced to the native radio driver using JNative (jnative.sf.net).

Music credit: Follow Me by Silence (http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/830/ )

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• energy
• harvesting
• demo
• processing
• vibration