Harvesting energy from indoor lighting

Epishine has released a development kit for their indoor lighting based light energy harvester solar panels. The panels are intended to operate at a relatively low illumination intensities. They are intended to operate between 20 to 1000 lux.

The development kit can output up to 3.3V at 300mA for a short period of time thanks to the 0.4F super capacitor. Upon testing, the LEH development kit was able to power up a Sensor Tag 2.0 made by Texas Instruments for few minutes. After which it will take few hours to charge up the capacitor.

Epshine development kit connected to a TI SensorTag 2.0

One exciting feature of the development kit is the flexible board. The thin substrate can be bent allowing interesting new installation locations.