 Okay this week is an ocean and I like their logo because it reminds me of Echo the Dolphin which was like the best Sega game ever. I'm glad you know the product is named Echo. I like that game because it was like I'm just a dolphin I'm just like helping out you know doing stuff okay. Okay this week I'm actually really glad because this is a product that I've known about for a really long time and this finally showed up on digikey.com slash new and I was like this is a really cool product I want people to know about. So this is there's it's a development kit the EVK 350U and 350 there's two versions basically depending on what frequency band 868 or 915 megahertz depending on fear in the US or Asia Europe. So what is this? This is a dev kit for I love this dolphin. It's a dev kit for basically all of an ocean's wireless sensor technology and energy harvesting tools. What I like about this it's kind of like a little bento box where you get one of each of their sensors and switches and I'll show them on the overhead as well as well as the radio control board USB key and everything so you get like a little bit of everything and their software so you get to really experiment with their you know battery list technology and I thought that was interesting because you know we I looked back at a bunch of the INFP eyes that we did recently and you know there's one thing that comes up over and over again is low power sensor IOT you know sensors got very very cheap right you can now get accelerometers temperature sensors humidity sensors for under a dollar which is wonderful but you know then you're nice to deal with them as an engineer like you as an engineer have to power them you have to get the data around with them you have to maintain and wire them and that's actually really challenging because the moment you have something that's battery powered as everyone knows you have to constantly recharge it like you have a phone if you don't charge it every day or two the battery runs out so wireless gives and takes it's very nice people to take things around untethered but you also have to maintain them and so you know one of the it was thinking about like how do we solve this in general one if you have a phone you just know you have to charge if you want to use it for other you know sensors that we have you know in industry like us thinking you know we saw the issue of like what happens when the battery runs out of your smoke detector right this is a very common wireless sensor it's not IOT but stand-alone but you know it has a 9-volt battery in it and it runs for like you know almost a year but eventually the battery runs out and then there's this there's this really big challenge with especially with fire alarms smoke detectors because you know they're so safety oriented like you really want to make sure they're running you almost never need them but when you need them they really need to be working and the problem is is that when the battery runs out you can't notify somebody that the battery ran out like there's no indicator of like this thing isn't working anymore and so you have to notify people when the battery gets low but not so low that it can't notify anymore and so you know for a lot of smoke detectors they have like a beep you know but like what if it says winter helm or a summer home and you don't you're not there and you you're out for the week you're on vacation you come back you don't realize that it's been beeping for a few weeks and maybe the battery has has died and so this issue of what do you do when you as an engineer have a sensor network or sensor nodes you want to collect the data but you don't want to deal with the battery management because you know not only does it take wireless of course takes a lot of power to transmit and so that's going to drain your battery but even rechargeable batteries have self-discharge rates so an ocean came up with this idea of what if we just didn't have batteries they were like what if we just took out that part because if you have wireless to found you but you don't have a battery you don't have to deal with the wiring you don't deal with the maintenance you don't have to deal with replacement and you also place you can literally put them anywhere you want in a duct behind a wall because you never have to get to it so an ocean is you know kind of famous for their kinetic energy harvesting but they you know they also have solar which we'll talk about and I remember when this came out in like early 2000s because at the Media Lab we're like oh my god this is the thing that everyone's always talking about how can we have you know sensor data radios that work without batteries and so the way it works is and you can you know watch a full video about it but basically you have it actually went to me I'll tell you actually because my part of the time was researching these you know those clickers that you use for your your stove if you have a gas stove and you have to have a little clicker and it you press and there's this like strong click and then the whatever the the material activates the the flame and then you can use that you know the gas inside and then you can use that to light your stove or your pilot light so it's the same idea it's like this very it's a very tough spring and you know as you pull back this you know spring activates and then you finally reach this activation point and it the spring releases and then you get this the coil moves and the coil movement sorry the material movement through the coil activates a magnetic field the magnetic field generates a small amount of current that goes through the coil and can turn on your electronics it's a very small amount you know you have to very quickly convert it because it's AC if you convert to DC and you have to get it to a reasonable amount but you can it looks like a big base layer like looking at about a hundred to 200 microjoules at two volts which you know might be enough to transmit a very quick amount of packetized data over radio yes let me please electric sparking matters correct it feels just like that it's not the same thing but that's what it feels like you you have to kind of press hard and this you know this was a patented design that they came out with it again I remember when when this came out because we were like this is really cool to see somebody actually take this theoretical I mean it's not theoretical people have been doing this but take taking something to production which would actually be usable by engineers as a module so they've sold the ECO the echo 200 and this little module you can see the coil you can see the mechanical switch the magnetic and this is what does the energy harvesting and then you match it up with a radio because of course the radio has to be designed so it can work at the voltage and the the microjoule capabilities right you can't take too long to wake up you have to wake up instantly sense the data you need to and immediately send it because there is the data is only available for that few milliseconds after the click it's not a long-term harvester there's also a day sheet about this so you can you can get the individual modules and then you know what's what is interesting is you probably have seen this we actually had one of these huge taps so you remember it was a kind of like you had to press the button and you would click and then it would turn on the lights so this was kind of a brilliant idea because the Philips Hue is a Zig Zigbee wireless led lighting system and so having a wired switch didn't make a lot of sense and also like why have batteries that you have to maintain and manage when you don't have to you it's okay to have the feeling of oh i'm clicking something to to turn on off the lights so it did make it into you know popular industry they have a bunch of different modules like I said 800 say 168 900 they also have bluetooth 2.4 gigahertz which is kind of cool they have Zigbee all the individual radio pieces you that you can mix and match to to make it work with your existing system although I think the best efficiency you're going to get is when you use your own radios of course and they've also expanded to not only have piezoelectric or piezoelectric magneto electric kinetic energy harvesting also solar solar is of course going to be a little different because you know you you put under a fluorescent light you know in an office or something and it you know slowly slowly slowly charges up a little you know super cap or built in lithium coin cell until it gets to a certain amount and then it can then burst data out this one of course you know may take longer for it to charge up but it can be repetitive you know something that sends data once a day and again there's no maintenance you can put anywhere you want as long as there's some light it works basically the way a solar calculator does and there's a couple modules for that as well there are things like a humidity and temperature sensor and of course the built in radios they also have like a really funny youtube video that's three hours long where this guy and he like kills like three hours he wants to say like hey you normally if you have to install a wired switch and you have to pull the wiring through the wall it takes three hours and 20 minutes so for three hours and 20 minutes he's just on this youtube video anyways check it out Vibble on digikey and it is in stock yeah i thought i would just show it really fast i did pick one up do you want to uh go to the right yes we'll see what i had i'll just quickly show off that's what they call the unboxing people can see how yeah i mean i i kind of unboxed already you get the the manual you get a usb cable um so this is the control board so this is the receiver which you would usb power um and this what would get the data in so you can um this is not what this is not the wirelessly charged part this is the receiver that would be part of your like your data harvesting setup or your you know hue bulb controller and then um this is the solar panel yep with uh you can sort of see this the solar cells the little battery um and this is a microcontroller and antenna and then the fun part is goodies yeah so this is the um mechanical switch so you know as you as you click it it is generating a little bit of current and what's interesting about this is it's actually designed to not require soldering so i removed this from the back of you know this was this uh radio is attached on so there's these touch points and if you look carefully you can see there's these little gold pads where this would just clip in and so you know if necessary you can replace this part um and then this is the clicky switch also this is basically the same thing inside of here but it has a nice um two-way switch up or down so you can have two options and then here's another radio receiver so you can use their radio network and use their software to you know detect basically when you've you've pressed the switch up and down so i think it's interesting you know this is this is you know you want to do energy harvesting it's totally a pain um because there's so much tuning like i remember like you know talking to people who are trying to do this kind of thing on their own and it was basically like you spend all of your time tuning an inductor and the coil and trying to get it to like work exactly right and then the amount of it's and it's hard to measure because as you measure it it's probably not reliable unless you use something like this yeah it's basically like they really figured this out so if you want to do energy harvesting um or kinetic um powered electronics like just get their module and you plug it in and like you're ready to go okay we have a video hi i'm walt siskins the CEO of Inotion we are the world leader in energy harvesting wireless technology what got me hooked to this company is this little device called mechanical energy harvester by pressing this switch we generate enough energy to send the wireless signal now let me show you what our customers have built from this technology this is an example of phillips is a switch that can turn off a lamp an led lamp and generate different scenes different colors another example is what's called the water sensor this sensor functions on the base of the same technology in the back you'll see some leather rings that will expand when in water and press effectively the same device to send a wireless signal turn off the valve and prevent more water damage other sources of energy that we use are light like in the example of this window contact that senses whether a window is open or closed another alternative that we use is temperature like in this heating valve this an ocean enabled heating valve uses the temperature differences in its own radiator to adjust the temperature based on the control system it's connected to also no wires no batteries now i got hooked to this company by this device the mechanical energy harvester i'm curious what can get you hooked to an ocean to our technology and what products you can think of using no wires and no batteries