Radiation powered battery-free energy-burst source for wireless weather stations and home-climate systems

The power of a complete picture of energy-weather information can be used for novel energy saving algorithms in home-climate systems. Exploiting the human biological clock, we recently proposed to optimize climate systems by allowing for a correlation between inside and outside temperatures, while preserving maximal comfort. Following our earlier disclosure on a Gas Energy Observatory, we here disclose a detailed description of a battery-free wireless weather station for reliable, long-term and maintenance-free measurements. It is solar powered. Combined with energy storage in high-voltage capacitors using recently introduced low-cost step-up and step-down DC-DC converters, a versatile energy burst-source is created. Energies of a few J per day suffice for measurement, data-collection and wireless data transmission in bursts to a central data-processing device inside a nearby home. Provided as a high-volume consumer product, residential weather data can be gathered over the internet for creating a climate observation system with unprecedented areal coverage and spatial resolution at no additional cost-serving modern climate research and studies on global warming.