Designing a General Purpose Development Platform for Energy-harvesting Applications

Battery-less energy-harvesting systems have widened the landscape of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications by taking computation to hard-to-reach places. Energy-harvesting sensors are perpetual, environment-friendly, cost-effective, and maintenance-free. Despite having such lucrative characteristics, battery-powered devices hold majority share of today's IoT market, since developing energy-harvesting applications require more expert knowledge, careful implementation, and rigorous debugging than applications with stable power. In this paper, we argue that development becomes easier, faster, efficient, and scalable with a standard, re-usable, general purpose platform that ensures the platform's versatility across various application with proper balance between abstraction and accessibility in hardware and software. Such platforms would provide flexibility across both hardware and software layers, at the same time, producing reliable performance. However, realizing this design point pose several research challenges that need to be identified and addressed. We identify the limitations in existing systems, articulate the challenges and provide guidelines for the community to work towards a general purpose platform that would enable new diversified battery-less applications in the future.