Demo: A Flexible Extension Board for IoT Devices to Enable their Batteryless Operation

Research on batteryless systems has recently bloomed, allowing the creation of IoT applications where devices operate exclusively from energy harvested from the environment. However, despite recent advances, batteryless systems still suffer from a rigid hardware design, with a given target device coupled with a built-in harvester and predefined components, which limits flexibility. We fill this gap and introduce BPMx: an extension board to build batteryless systems offering an unprecedented level of flexibility in the choice of target device and harvester. Moreover, BPMx integrates a fully-configurable power manager with user-defined voltage thresholds, supply voltage, and the ability to fully disconnect subsystems such as a built-in real-time clock and non-volatile memory. BPMx is affordable (≈ 40 EUR), open-source, compatible with the popular Arduino Rev3 pin layout, and needs as little as 30 μA to operate. In this demo, we showcase how BPMx enables the batteryless operation of an nRF52840-DK implementing a periodic sensing application.