Demo: Battery-free Visible Light Sensing

Abstract

We present our efforts to design the first Visible Light Sensing (VLS) system that consumes only tens of uW of power to sense and communicate. We achieve this by designing a sensing mechanism that uses solar cells to achieve sub-uW of power consumption for sensing. Further, we devise an ultra-low power backscatter-based transmission mechanism we call Scatterlight that transmits digital readings without incurring the processing and computation overhead of existing sensors. We demonstrate our preliminary prototype that detects and transmits three simple hand gestures.