Microchip Technology and Cymbet have joined hands to offer the XLP 16-bit Energy Harvesting Development Kit, a customizable energy-harvesting application development kit with a modular development board.
Microchip’s contribution to the kit is the PIC24F16KA102 microcontroller, featuring eXtreme low power technology, along with support for PICtail daughter boards for rapid evaluation of a wide variety of system functions, including ZigBee, proprietary wireless connectivity and SD memory cards.
Cymbet contributes its EnerChip EH Eval-08 energy harvesting board, which harvests indoor or outdoor light energy and stores it in solid-state, thin-film EnerChip rechargeable energy storage devices. The EnerChips supply power to the XLP development board when light is not available.
The development board portion of the kit features the PIC24F16KA102 XLP MCU, on-board temperature sensors, data EEPROM, a potentiometer, watch crystal, LEDs, and an expansion connector for PICtail modules. Supported PICtails include RF, SD/MMC cards, speech playback and more.
Power condition and capacity are monitored by the PIC24F using Energy Aware software algorithms developed by Microchip and Cymbet. The monitored information can be reported to the PC user interface over a USB connection. This allows users to experiment with balancing energy collection versus energy use and maximise the benefits of energy harvesting.
Image: Microchip
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