Portable wireless distance measurement system powered by intentional human action

This work proposes and experimentally validates an handheld distance measurement system powered by energy harvesting through the ElectroMagnetic (EM) effect. The system is entirely battery-less and powered on-demand by the user force exerted on the lever of an hand-crack EM converter. With a single excitation force of about 19.6 N over a lever travel of 2 cm, the proposed system is able to perform a distance measurement between a target object and the embedded ultrasonic sensor, show the reading on a LCD display, and transmit the data through a 433-MHz wireless-UART link to an host PC.