17 Jun 2010
Green vehicle expo heads to Shanghai
Green Vehicle Expo heads to Shanghai June 17-19.
16 Jun 2010
ZigBee wireless temperature sensor energized by a thermo generator
At the recent IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Storage conference Europe in Munich, an excellent presentation was given by the $20 billion Schneider Electric on a ZigBee Wireless Temperature Sensor Energized by a Thermo Generator.
16 Jun 2010
Electric Vehicles- The Clever Ten Year Strategies
The electric vehicle business is over $33 billion today at ex factory prices but cars are less than half of that. As the market nearly quintuples over the next ten years, cars will rise to nearly 55% of the business but the devil is in the detail...
14 Jun 2010
The race for plug and play vibration harvesting
The market for vibration harvesters will increase perhaps one hundred fold when they are broad band so they can be fitted without tuning - or with auto tuning - to the vibration encountered. Ideally they should be made to standard battery sizes and sold as a non polluting, long life battery replacement.
11 Jun 2010
Standards will speed energy harvesting adoption
At the recent IDTechEx conference Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe in Munich, Roy Freeland, of the ISA100.18 Power Sources Working Group, spoke on how standards with hasten the adoption of energy harvesting, not least in Wireless Sensor Networks WSN.
8 Jun 2010
Piezo and pyroelectric energy sources
At the recent IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe conference in Munich, Dr. Nantakan MUENSIT, associate professor at the Material Physics Laboratory, Department of Physics, Prince of Songkla University (PSU), Hat Yai, Thailand spoke on "Applications of Piezoelectric and Pyroelectric Materials as Microsources of Energy".
7 Jun 2010
ZigBee for Energy Harvesting and Very Low Power
The ZigBee standards lead to electronic systems that are inherently self organizing (self calibrating) and self healing and such devices use much less power and can be deployed in larger numbers than the original WiFi and Bluetooth options. However, we now have low power WiFi and Bluetooth and many proprietary protocols for wireless sensor networks that use much less power than ZigBee, power being a constant worry because WSN needs so much electricity and yet the devices usually need to be small. So what are the ZigBee enthusiasts doing to stay relevant?
4 Jun 2010
UCT open up new markets with printed nanosilicon on paper
Professors Margit Härting and David Britton at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have been working on the printing of nano silicon electronic components in parallel with Kovio in California and others.
4 Jun 2010
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles - Part three
Electric vehicles (EVs) are free running vehicles that partly or wholly use electricity for traction, whether by land, sea or air.
4 Jun 2010
Where art thou OLED?
David Fyfe, the ex CEO of CDT who now works as a consultant for its parent company Sumitomo, gave a presentation on the OLED market at LOPE-C this week. Speaking to the history of OLEDs, he says that LCDs have drastically closed the performance gap, perhaps fuelled by the threat of OLEDs.
4 Jun 2010
Electric cars - learning from the past
In 1880, they said that the future of the car was electric. In April 2010, Bill Ford of Ford Motor Company said "It appears that the biggest game-changer will be electric vehicles."
2 Jun 2010
Flexible and hybrid electronics
Flexible displays, lighting and solar panels may open the way to new kinds of consumer products and architectural features, but the real driver of the current up swell of interest in flexible, printed or hybrid electronics technology is manufacturers seeking ways to reduce production costs of large-area devices.
External press release
2 Jun 2010
Solvay and Thinfilm enter commercial agreement
Solvay Solexis (Solvay) will begin to market its newly developed SolveneTM polymer for applications in printed electronics with its partner Thin Film Electronics ASA (Thinfilm).
2 Jun 2010
IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase passes 4000 RFID projects
By a big margin. the world's largest database of RFID projects is the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase. It has just surpassed 4000 projects in 111 countries. Containing technical details, descriptive text, 770 company RFID slide shows and audio, ...
1 Jun 2010
Record breaking pure electric motorcycles
KillaCycle is the world's fastest electric motorcycle. It achieved zero to 60 mph in less than one second and 176 MPH (282 km/h) using A123 batteries.
External press release
31 May 2010
EnOcean reaps recognition
The IDTechEx Energy Harvesting Award 2010 has been presented to EnOcean for its development in the field of thermoelectric energy use.
28 May 2010
Some impressions of Energy Harvesting Europe
The IDTechEx Energy Harvesting Europe event in Munich had its first day on 26 May. Here are some impressions from the first day.
27 May 2010
Energy Harvesting Europe and WSN/RTLS Award Winners
This week more than 250 people attended the second annual IDTechEx event on Energy Harvesting and Wireless Sensor Networks & Real Time Locating Systems. These two events are co-located given the overlap in topic and attendees were delighted with the breadth of subjects that were covered. The exhibition had trebled from last year to 20 exhibitors.