Long range wireless sensing powered by plant-microbial fuel cell

Going low power and having a low or neutral impact on the environment is key for embedded systems, as pervasive and wearable consumer electronics is growing. In this paper, we present a self-sustaining, ultra-low power device, supplied by a Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell (PMFC) and capable of smart sensing and long-range communication. The use of a PMFC as a power source is challenging but has many advantages like the only requirement of watering the plant. The system uses aggressive power management thanks to FRAM technology exploited to retain microcontroller status and to shutdown electronics without losing context information. Experimental results show that the proposed system paves the way to energy neutral sensors powered by biosystems available almost anywhere on Earth.