Hardware to enable large-scale deployment and observation of soil microbial fuel cells
Published in Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, 2022
Soil microbial fuel cells are a promising source of energy for outdoor sensor networks. These biological systems are sensitive to environmental conditions, therefore more data is needed on their behavior “in the wild” to enable the creation of an energy system capable of being widely deployed. Prior work on early characterization of microbial fuel cells relied on extremely accurate, but expensive, logging hardware. To scale up the number of deployment sites, we present custom logging hardware, specially designed to accurately monitor the behavior of microbial fuel cells at low cost. This paper describes the design and evaluation of the board, which is open source and freely available on GitHub.
John Madden, Gabriel Marcano, Stephen Taylor, Pat Pannuto, Colleen Josephson