Place-&-Play industrial router addressing potential explosive atmospheres

In general, deployments of Wireless Sensors Networks in industrial rigs face several constrains, especially those concerning power supply of scattered devices: cabling is expensive and takes a long time, and, on the hand, batteries are sensitive to both current peaks and high temperatures, thus requiring periodic replacement. This work presents a low power router which, by gathering energy from a tiny solar panel and storing it in a supercapacitor, addresses the stringent regulations that have to be met to work in potentially explosive atmospheres and, still, keep working continuously so as to serve communication requirements of wireless networks in such harsh environments: evaluation of the energy balance under different harvesting and consumption conditions was carried out, whose results ensure the feasibility of this technology.