ByteSnap Design Publishes Blueprint on Energy Harvesting for Maintenance-Free Industrial IoT
July 09, 2026
News
According to BiteSnap Design, battery maintenance is beginning to be one of the largest obstacles to large-scale Industrial IoT (IIoT) deployments. The company recently published an engineering blueprint, “Energy Harvesting: The Key to Maintenance-Free Industrial IoT” in response to hardware designers facing soaring maintenance costs and tightening environmental guidelines.
The press release unveiled that the blueprint is written with hardware developers, design engineers, and system architects in mind. It observes the commercial and logistical challenges of powering large-scale, distributed sensor networks in remote, inaccessible, and hazardous environments. The piece covers power budget calculations, supercapacitor selection, and the energy requirements of wireless protocols including LoRaWAN, Zigbee, BLE, and NB Cellular.
As noted by ByteSnap Design, commercial perovskite photovoltaic cells are now achieving efficiencies of up to 38 percent under indoor lighting conditions, increasing the viability of self-powered industrial sensors which could lead to the acceleration of adopting maintenance-free IoT deployments in warehouses, factories and other indoor industrial environments.
Dunstan Power, Director of ByteSnap Design, stated: “The strict power budget realities that engineering teams must evaluate during the initial architecture phase are extensive. Devices drawing microamps with milliamp pulses can run indefinitely, but anything requiring more than 10 mA continuous draw is simply not viable in remote or hard-to-reach locations. That’s why energy harvesting is essential, making hybrid systems that combine photovoltaic, vibration, and thermoelectric inputs today's baseline for maintenance-free industrial IoT.”
Within the blueprint is a case study demonstrating the practical viability of energy harvesting. For a UK rail project, ByteSnap Design engineered a zero-maintenance trackside backup system that combines solar, wind, and train-induced vibration, managed by an Analog Devices energy harvesting IC and supported by a supercapacitor. The system powers LoRa transmissions while avoiding the need for routine trackside maintenance.
Included is ByteSnap Design’s project feasibility calculator, allowing designers to evaluate whether an energy harvesting approach is viable for a given application. It also includes the full rail case study, protocol comparisons to support early-stage design decisions.
For more information, visit bytesnap.com.
Chad Cox is the Production Editor at Embedded Computing Design. His responsibilities are centered around content creation, writing and editing, and article research and development. Chad covers industry news and events and is known to interact with various industrial leaders via on-premise visits and online interviews. He is responsible for the digital footprint and dissemination of news via social media posts, advertising creation and the production of newsletters including the Embedded Computing Design’s Daily.
He is well versed in many facets of industrial computing including Edge AI, IoT, Processing, Security, Open Source, and more.
Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. in Cultural and Analytical Literature and holds a master’s in education.
