Vodafone Innovus – Updates

In the era of AI, data is everything — and IoT is where that data begins.
But at the edge, where devices live, energy becomes the real constraint.

During the Perocube project, we powered outdoor GSM devices using PV + battery, a well-established approach for field deployments.
Now, we’re shifting focus to a different problem: indoor operation, ultra-low cost, bluetooth , and zero maintenance.

So, we started with the simplest possible approach.

Step 1 — Ultra-low cost circuit
A small PV cell + diode + storage capacitor directly powering an of the self BLE device.
No harvesting IC, minimal components, extremely low BOM.
Surprisingly, this works for very low-duty BLE operation (BLE broadcasting data)

Step 2 — Energy harvesting optimization
Next, we will evaluate an e-peas energy harvesting PMIC to improve energy extraction, cold-start behavior, and performance under low light conditions.
The goal is to find the optimal balance between simplicity, cost, PV characteristics (type & size), and energy autonomy for future battery-reduced BLE IoT devices (from #Moko).
Curious to see how far we can push solar-powered BLE with minimal hardware.

PV only, simplest approach (testing with #Moko Beacon)

Testing ePEAS to harvest energy (testing with #Moko Beacon)

PV no battery test: device broadcasting and data received by mobile phone.  3.28V reported by the BLE device.