 This video is sponsored by PCBWay. Hi guys, a couple of months ago I showed you how to develop my solar power weather station, as you know that project isn't efficient So I decided to improve it. You may be wondering how the answer is by using an ultra low-power energy Arvester instead of a simple LDO with a battery manager and lastly the solar panel with a more suitable one So in this video I will show you how I developed this simple board to study the efficiency of the energy Arvester and the wall system. I call this board Objects EHTK And if you want know more about how I designed this board I leave the link of the repo below in the description and now let's start with the basics of energy Arvester The most difficult things about developing this board was component selection In fact my goal was to compare two energy Arvester, but the problem is which one to choose So for a couple of days I searched for the two best energy Arvester with a very good performance price ratio You should know that these chips are quite expensive compared to my controllers such as the ESP32 So the main features that a good energy Arvester must have, the first one is the boost converter with a maximum power point tracking controller It's a technique used with a variable power source like solar panels to maximize the energy extraction The energy Arvester should have the ability to connect a battery or a super capacitor And I integrated the LDO for my controller and sensor And lastly a battery protection with a load cut-off for battery life, I mean to increase the battery life of the device So after some research I found these two chips, the first one is the SPV1050 by SET Microelectronics And the second is the ADP1591 by analog device Are both great, however as you can see the ADP is twice expensive and for now we don't care much about the price Unfortunately the SPV is out of stock right now, but I was able to get two units for this first prototype First of all let's start soldering the board and thank you again PCBWay for sponsoring this project I have been using PCBWay to manufacture my PCBs for 3 years and they have never disappointed me Their customer service is always available to help you, also they have 3D printing and CNC machining service If you have an idea for a project PCBWay can manufacture it Replaceing small components is essential to have the right equipment A digital microscope like my D249S by Endostars helps so much in soldering SMD components I'll leave you the link below to buy it So guys before we start with the test I wanted to show you the board, so it's a fast review This one is the battery connector for this specific energy investor And this one is the other battery connector for this energy investor Instead here we have the connector for solar panel and the same here for other energy investor And here we have the output connector for sensor, microcontroller, etc And finally the coincell socket is the backup battery for the ADP energy investor And can also be used as the main battery of the SPV energy investor And now we finally start with some test The first test I did was to connect a small monocrystalline solar panel to the SPV As you can see the solar panel is exposed to sunlight coming from my window I did not connect any LOD or the battery so it's just the solar panel with the energy investor So I analyzed the performance of the circuit with my oscilloscope and this is the result So the yellow signal is the solar panel while the blue signal is the regulated 3.3 voltage output of the energy investor Remember there is no LOD connected and that's why it can keep the output voltage stable It's a simple test to try the solar panel together with an energy investor Now let's do more in-depth test To make the test more reliable because my goal is to simulate an IoT device We will use as a LOD this dev board I made for this test This board is based on the microcontroller NRF 52840 into which I uploaded a test firmware It's LED blinking and the red LED is connected to the microcontroller via 220 home resistor It's to simulate a LOD like a sensor or a driver, I don't know The next step was to measure the power consumption of the LOD using Nordix power profiler kit I did the test by powering the LOD at 1.8V and 3.3V Since the microcontroller works with both voltages So at 1.8V the power consumption is about 1mA Instead at 3.3V the power consumption is about 2.5mA Now with this data we know the power consumption of the LOD So what we are going to do is test the individual energy investors and observe with the power profiler kit the current that is drawn by the energy investor to allow the LOD to operate properly And this is the setup I used to test the SPV So with the oscilloscope I measured the battery voltage and the solar panel voltage and finally the regulated output voltage And this is the power consumption of the energy investor by SET Microelectronic As you can see it's less than 1mA I'm happy with the result considering that the solar panel I used is not the most suitable for this specific energy investor It's also important to say that the regulated outputs of this energy investor are two The first one is the 1.8V and the second one is the 3.3V Also it's possible to use the two LODs at the same time, of course they must be enabled So I can decide to power the microcontroller with the output regulated at 3.3V and instead the sensor with the output regulated at 1.8V I repeated this test by powering the microcontroller at 1.8V And this is the result of the test And the power consumption is about 400mA Now let's test the ADP This energy investor handles the two outputs differently The first one is not regulated and the second one is regulated and through a resistor you can decide the voltage In this case it was set at 3.3V So the ADP is set in boost mode As you can see the power consumption is similar to the SPV And also by changing the brightness of the spotlight the output voltage from the solar panel also changes and therefore the battery consumption Ok guys, what I have shown you are the first test I have done To test all features of the two energy investors a video would not be enough The goal of this video is to introduce the topic for the future projects and the future videos As you can understand it's a complex topic and I have a lot to learn about energy harvesting In the future I plan to buy more more crystalline solar panels and also test some and other energy investors So later we will be ready to develop the first optimized IoT device And that's it Thank you for watching until the end If you have any advice please write it below in the comments And thank you again PCBWay for sponsoring this project And see you next time