Awarded Best Master’s Thesis in ICT 2018
Development, Deployment & Evaluation of Wireless IoT Devices with Energy Harvesting
Students Rolf Arne Kjellby, Svein Erik Løtveit & Thor Eirik Johnsrud, did their Master Thesis under main supervision of Associate professor Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and co-supervision of Assistant Professor Geir Jevne. Project task is defined by Assoc. Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi. Students designed and developed self-powered and ultra-low powered wireless IoT devices for indoor and outdoor applications. These nodes are tested and work up to 1.8 km and can be deployed in remote places where the accessibility is limited. The nodes can also be deployed in harsh-weather conditions without requiring any maintenance. Designed nodes are of professional market-quality, market-ready, efficient, self-powered and maintenance free. Many possibilities for further research based on these nodes including a start-up company.
Automation of indoor climate is becoming increasingly popular for both household and industrial use. Through automation, comfort increases and power consumption decreases. In order to deploy an automation system, sensors are required.
This master thesis proposes two wireless sensor nodes based on ATmega328p along with the nRF24l01+ transceiver and nRF52840 with various capabilities in both star and multi-hop network configurations. The designed nodes are fully self-powered through energy harvesting, and the nodes are completely self sustainable with no wires, and no user intervention is required during the lifetime of the components. In addition, these nodes do not require any maintenance and can be deployed in remote places. The wireless sensor nodes can be deployed anywhere as long as they are in range of a gateway or nodes that can forward towards a gateway, and as long as there is sufficient light level for the solar panel, such as indoor lights. Fully functional wireless sensor nodes are designed and tested, and compared the performance of both star and multi-hop topologies. The developed nodes consume less power than what is harvested in both indoor and outdoor environments.