If you’ve ever tried to make a really low-power circuit — especially one that runs on harvested power — you have probably fallen into at least a few of the many traps that await the unwary in this particular realm of electronic design. Well, Dave Young has been there, seen the traps, and lived to tell about it. In these territories, even “simple” systems can exhibit very complex, and sometimes downright confusing behavior when all possible operating conditions are considered. In his 2019 Hackaday Superconference talk: Scrounging, Sipping, and Seeing Power — Techniques For Planning, Implementing, And Verifying Off-Grid Power Systems, Dave discusses a number of these issues, how they interplay with low-power designs, and tricks he’s collected over the years to design and, more importantly, test these deceptively simple systems.
Dave is an electrical engineer and his company, Young Circuit Designs, has worked in the test and measurement, energy, and low-power consumer industries. We were lucky to have him share some of his 15 years of experience on the Supercon stage this past November, specifically discussing devices powered from harvested energy, be it wave energy (think oceans not RF), thermal energy, or solar. The first lesson is that in these systems, architecture is key. Digging deeper, Dave considers three aspects of the architecture, as mentioned in the talk title: scrounging, sipping, and seeing power.
Continue reading “The Cult Of Really Low-Power Circuits: Scrounging, Sipping, And Seeing Power”
As a self-professed “Crazy Laser Lady”, part of this investigation examined how components held up to big lasers delivering power far outside normal operating range. This turned up exciting effects like a fiber fuse (~17:30 in the video) which is actually a plasma fire propagating through the fiber optic. It looks cool, but it’s destructive and useless for covert attacks. More productive results came when lasers were used to carefully degrade select components to make the system vulnerable.
