Northwestern University researchers have introduced a soil-microbe-powered fuel cell, significantly outperforming similar technologies and providing a sustainable solution for powering low-energy devices.
I kind of get op’s point. It’s not straight up debunked, but it’s so few microwatts that they can power the sensor but they can’t store log data.
It requires a close proximity powered base station nearby to fire a signal out to get reflected back somehow.
I’m having a hard time picturing any viable setup outside of a laboratory experiment. If you’ve got a powered base station within a few inches of it why not just power it with that?
“Furthermore, the researchers used waterproofing material on the cathode’s surface, allowing it to work during flooding and assuring progressive drying after submersion.”
They claim “68 times more than required to operate the sensors”, then mention a sensor to measure soil moisture.
A basic soil moisture sensor, like say, the ones I have stacked on a shelf here, will work on 2 AA batteries. It runs on 2V at 10mA. So that’s 20 milliWatts, and in willing to be a fair bit of that goes into the electronics that make a red, green or orange led light up at certain moisture levels, and the bit that beeps when below a certain level.
Still, this sets something of an upper limit at 1.3W, or maybe 680 mA? Those seem rather high, so I’m betting their moisture sensor is a bit more delicate than my model. It depends on the size and number of cells though.
Im pretty sure most soil moisture measurment devices just measure the capacitance to measure dielectric permittivity. U can design such a setup to use any arbitrary amount of power depending how close the electrodes are rogether etc etc.
Yeah, I am imagining the soil moisture things from the garden store, with the little needle gauge thing, that takes so little power that there's no battery slot. I feel like the amount of power this thing makes is extremely low.
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