Dracula Technologies Aims to Drink Your Indoor Lighting to Power Battery-Free IoT Devices

Excellently-named energy harvesting specialist Dracula Technologies has announced that it will be showing off its high-efficiency light-harvesting system for low-power devices, based on a printable organic photovoltaic approach it calls LAYER.

"The situation today is unsustainable. A minimum of 50 billion industrial IoT [Internet of Things] devices are expected to be deployed by 2025. The devices that are already deployed today consume too much energy and generate too much e-waste: 15 billion batteries are thrown away every year," claims founder and chief executive officer Brice Cruchon of the problem Dracula is trying to solve.

"We use organic photovoltaic, the optimal solution to power low energy consumption connected objects. Our ultra-thin products can take any shape, adapting to the smallest imaginable format to respond to a diversity of applications. Moreover, they can be used indoors, which makes them the perfect solution for a future, where more than half of those 50 billion industrial IoT devices will be used indoors."

Digitally printed through inkjets, the Dracula LAYER photovoltaics offer the ability to confirm to "any imaginable shape," the company claims, making them easier to integrate into devices than flat planar cells. Their key selling point, though, is their ability to harvest useful amounts of energy even in lighting conditions as low as 50 lux — roughly the same mount of light emitted by an emergency exit panel running in battery mode.

To prove the technology's flexibility, Dracula has confirmed it will be showing off a range of device samples during the Consumer Electronics Show this week — including an autonomous temperature logger, a carbon dioxide (CO₂) sensor, an infrared sensor, and a remote control — all if which draw their required energy from LAYER photovoltaics harvesting indoor light.

More information on the company's technology is available on the Dracula website.