Wireless tech saves energy - and makes better mousetrap

Tucked in a dark corner of the Cebit trade show, in Hall 2, lies a mousetrap. Not just any old mousetrap, but a wireless-enabled one.

The trap is a standard live mousetrap, made in China and costing about €10 (US$14), to which Germany company BSC Computer has attached a small wireless transmitter.

Jörg Hoffman hasn't caught any mice with the trap yet, but if he does then the transmitter will warn him that the trap needs inspecting. It doesn't matter how long he has to wait, because there's no battery in it to go flat.

The transmitter uses an extremely low-powered wireless protocol developed by Siemens in the 1990s for building automation, and later spun off into a separate company called EnOcean. Now, through the EnOcean Alliance, the company is trying to get the technology adopted as a standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and has built an ecosystem of 175 companies around it, according to Graham Martin, chairman and CEO of the alliance. Four of them -- EnOcean itself, Murata, IK Elektronik and Vicos -- now make the radio chips at the core of the system, he said.

EnOcean's innovation was to harvest energy from the mechanical movement of light switches, swipe card readers and even door handles to power its tiny radio transmitter. Later came solar-powered thermostats, and radiator valves that used the Peltier effect to extract energy from the temperature differential between two surfaces[...]

The advent of EnOcean-to-TCP/IP gateways in late 2008, though, turned the technology into a tool for whole-building control and also brought it to the attention of fans of home automation technology, according to Martin.

(Source www.networkworld.com, 01.03.2011)