Bionic Egg: Sealed mobile sensor packaging design with adaptive power consumption

Abstract

The goals of this research are to design a 3D printed environmental data logger while considering sensor packaging space constraints and to implement a smart power consumption system for increased endurance. The product is sealed for harsh environmental conditions per IP65 standard as well as for impacts. In this paper, we share our electronics packaging design approach for a mobile sensor suite so called “Bionic Egg” which is capable of logging ambient conditions as well as external forces on a turkey egg during transportation. While available space is limited due to the shell size, there is an insufficient amount of room to mount a large enough battery to execute all day long operation requirement. We designed an adaptive power consumption methodology which adopts a reactive sensory usage logic by adjusting processor clock between 2–72Mhz. The power consumption of Low Profile Quad Flat Package (LQFP) 32 bit ARM Cortex microcontroller could be reduced as low as to 230 µA in deep sleep mode with a maximum of 62.1 mA drain for continuous logging state. The Mobile sensor suite includes inertial measurement unit (IMU), temperature and humidity sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS) unit with an internal antenna as well as a SD (Secure Digital) card board for data logging. The overall design approach, hardware structure, power consumption data as well as software structure are presented.