Tiny battery-free devices float in the wind like dandelion seeds
Summary
Tiny battery-free devices float in the wind like dandelion seeds Wireless sensors can monitor how temperature, humidity or other environmental conditions vary across large swaths of land, such as farms or forests. This system is about 30 times as heavy as a 1 milligram dandelion seed but can still travel up to 100 meters in a moderate breeze, about the length of a football field, from where it was released by a drone. They’ll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. We took a 2D projection of that to create the base design for our structures,” said lead author Vikram Iyer, a UW assistant professor in the Allen School. We added a ring structure to make it more stiff and take up more area to help slow it down.” To keep things light, the team used solar panels instead of a heavy battery to power the electronics.
