The main problem in designing devices powered with Energy Harvesting is an estimation of energy demand of low-power devices as well as quantity of energy provided by the selected energy transducer in the assumed work conditions. Due to the work characteristic of each block of the device and properties of the measured signal, measurement is not trivial. The paper presents the proposal of the micro-charge measurement device based...

The paper presents the method for the estimation of the energy consumption of the low-power microcontroller-based devices. Due to high dynamics of the changes of the supply current of the tested devices during the operational cycle, the consumed energy estimation is not easy. In order to avoid disadvantages of known methods, the charge balancing method was employed similarly like in some types of A/D converters.

The paper presents low-power device simulator designed for testing of micro-energy measurement methods. Such kind methods can be used for evaluation of power systems based on Energy Harvesting. The device allows to set the current consumption characteristic over the time, thus making possible playing the role of different types of low-power devices e.g. simulating sensor network node.