Flicker: Rapid Prototyping for the Batteryless Internet-of-Things

Batteryless, energy-harvesting sensing systems are critical to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) vision and sustainable, long-lived, untethered systems. Unfortunately, developing new batteryless applications is challenging. Energy resources are scarce and highly variable, power failures are frequent, and successful applications typically require custom hardware and special expertise. In this paper, we present Flicker, a platform for quickly prototyping batteryless embedded sensors. Flicker is an extensible, modular, "plug and play" architecture that supports RFID, solar, and kinetic energy harvesting; passive and active wireless communication; and a wide range of sensors through common peripheral and harvester interconnects. Flicker supports recent advances in failure-tolerant timekeeping, testing, and debugging, while providing dynamic federated energy storage where peripheral priorities and user tasks can be adjusted without hardware changes. Flicker's software tools automatically detect new hardware configurations, and simplify software changes. We have evaluated the overhead and performance of our Flicker prototype and conducted a case study. We also evaluated the usability of Flicker in a user study with 19 participants, and found it had above average or excellent usability according to the well known System Usability Survey.

无电池、能量收集传感系统对于物联网（IoT）愿景以及可持续、长寿命、无束缚的系统至关重要。不幸的是，开发新的无电池应用具有挑战性。能源稀缺且变化很大，电力故障频繁，并且成功的应用通常需要定制硬件和特殊专业知识。在本文中，我们介绍了Flicker，一个用于快速制作无电池嵌入式传感器原型的平台。Flicker是一种可扩展的、模块化的“即插即用”架构，它支持射频识别（RFID）、太阳能和动能收集；无源和有源无线通信；以及通过通用外设和收集器互连的多种传感器。Flicker支持容错计时、测试和调试方面的最新进展，同时提供动态联合储能，无需更改硬件即可调整外设优先级和用户任务。Flicker的软件工具可自动检测新的硬件配置，并简化软件更改。我们已经评估了我们的Flicker原型的开销和性能，并进行了一个案例研究。我们还在一项有19名参与者的用户研究中评估了Flicker的可用性，并且根据著名的系统可用性调查发现它具有高于平均水平或优秀的可用性。