Ekho: Realistic and Repeatable Experimentation for Tiny Energy-Harvesting Sensors

Josiah Hester, Timothy Scott, Jacob Sorber
School of Computing, Clemson University

Our paper, “Ekho: Realistic and Repeatable Experimentation for Tiny Energy-Harvesting Sensors” describes the design and evaluation of a new tool for recording and replaying energy harvesting conditions. Energy harvesting is a necessity for many small, embedded sensing devices, that must operate maintenance-free for long periods of time. However, understanding how the environment changes and it’s effects on device behavior has always been a source of frustration. Ekho allows system designers working with ultra low power devices, to realistically predict how new hardware and software configurations will perform before deployment. By taking advantage of electrical characteristics all energy sources share, Ekho is able to emulate many different energy sources (e.g., Solar, RF, Thermal, and Vibrational) and takes much of the guesswork out of experimentation with tiny, energy harvesting sensing systems.

This paper received the BEST PAPER Award at the 12th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2014), held in Memphis, Tennessee November 3-6, 2014.

Analog-Front End PCB

This is the PCB for the analog front end. We are hosting it on OSH Park so anyone can print the board themselves.

More details on assembly, and usage can be found at josiahhester.com/ekho

Eagle files, gerbers, Bill of Materials, and Code can be found on Github.