Low power event detection on microcontrollers
An Empirical Evaluation and Hierarchical Sensing Pipeline
Z. Corbanie (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
M.A. Zuñiga Zamalloa – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
H. Liu – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
J.M. Weber – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Embedded sensing systems relying on energy harvesting — such as electromagnetic radiation, thermoelectric energy, and kinetic energy — generally are not able to harvest sufficient power to function under normal operations for most devices, and thus operate under severe power constraints. To ensure sustainable, battery free functionality, the microcontroller (MCU) must remain at a low power deep sleep state during idle periods. It is woken up by a sensor, sending an external hardware interrupt when an environmental event occurs. However, there is a trade off between a sensor’s power consumption, detection range, accuracy, and latency. This paper presents two primary contributions: 1) An empirical evaluation of various sensor wake up systems. 2) The design and implementation of a multi stage hierarchical event detection pipeline. This pipeline consists of an ultra low power coarse sensor that activates a high accuracy, but higher power sensor, minimizing the current draw while staying reliable.