WEH: Powering Digital Devices: Just add RF!

In this talk, we discuss the latest developments in using existing digital devices as power harvesting components. While most RFID devices rely on carefully tuned harvesting components, the underlying technology is already present in the everyday digital devices we use. We show that with the addition of a simple wire antenna to microcontroller, we can turn a device into a fully functioning wireless sensor. We will discuss how to build an "ex-nihilo" harvester, the characteristics of the ESD protection systems and how we utilize these circuits for power harvesting. We will also present a battery-free Bluetooth sensor that is able to run entirely from harvested RF energy, created from an unmodified Bluetooth sensor.