Blog - Kliskatek

Four costs that decide what custom battery-free sensors can measure: excitation, settling time, analogue conditioning and calibration

Beyond Temperature: What Custom Battery-Free Sensors Can Actually Measure

2026-08-31 by Mikel Choperena

Custom battery-free sensors go past temperature: pressure, load cells, pH and e-ink, what each one really costs, and where the honest limit is.

Battery-free sensor lifetime inside a sealed high voltage asset, on a forty year timeline: a coin cell lasts five to ten years, the reader outside the enclosure gets replaced several times, and the real design target is the access interval, the moment somebody next opens the enclosure, next to the five mechanisms that age once the cell is gone.

Battery-Free Sensor Lifetime: What a Forty-Year Asset Actually Demands

2026-08-24 by Mikel Choperena

Battery-free sensor lifetime is not battery life with the cell removed. What really ages in a sealed HV asset, and why the access interval sets the spec.

A battery-free sensor sampling rate that collapses at a threshold: as the power reaching the device falls towards the leakage current, the interval between readings runs away and the device stops reporting altogether, shown next to the arithmetic of a 150 µJ session, about 30 seconds at 10 µW, about 3 seconds at 100 µW and under a second at 1 mW.

Battery-Free Sensor Sampling Rate: What Your Power Budget Actually Allows

2026-08-17 by Mikel Choperena

A battery-free sensor sampling rate is arithmetic, not a setting. The three inputs, the leakage cliff, and four levers when the spec asks for more.

A cross-domain engineering case study of a production test bench split between two suppliers: the hydraulics specialist owns the loop and the motion controller, the systems team owns hardware control, the measurement chain, the data model and the verdict, and the seam between them has to settle command authority, the reference clock, units and signs, what a test is, fault handling and who owns the record.

When Splitting Is the Right Call: A Cross-Domain Engineering Case Study

2026-08-10 by Mikel Choperena

A cross-domain engineering case study: why we split a production test bench between two suppliers, and why the seam decided the whole project.

The three questions that qualify a maintenance round for NFC sensor tags: does somebody already walk the route, does the value change more slowly than the round interval, and can a person reach the point with a phone. A tap removes transcription and proves presence within about two centimetres, but the tag harvests energy only while the phone field is present, so nothing is recorded between rounds.

NFC Maintenance Rounds: When to Put Sensors on Your Route

2026-08-03 by Mikel Choperena

NFC maintenance rounds do not replace the walk, they change what it produces. Three questions decide whether your inspection route is a candidate

Diagram of the four RF decisions an OEM has to lock in before the mechanical design freezes when embedding a battery-free sensor. Before the freeze, while it is still a drawing revision: the reader plane (where the reader sits, who holds it and how often it reads, which sets the energy budget — about 30 µW at 5 m over UHF against 10 mW at 5 cm over NFC); the RF window (metal does not pass RF, so the aperture is a mechanical decision made with the enclosure concept); the material stack (potting, paint, gaskets and distance to metal, against which the antenna must be tuned); and the end-of-line test (a fixed, repeatable read geometry that records margin rather than pass or fail). After tooling, firmware, commissioning and reader integration are still open, while aperture location and size, antenna tuning, read distance and where the sensor sits are closed, recoverable only at the price of a tool.

Embedding Sensors During Manufacturing: RF Guidelines

2026-07-272026-07-27 by Mikel Choperena

Designing a battery-free sensor into your product? The RF, enclosure and end-of-line test decisions OEMs must lock in before the mechanical design freezes.

Three roadmap strategies for supporting wireless protocols in a battery-free product — commit to one protocol (single market, lowest cost, the right default); ship one but keep the sensing core reusable (recommended when a second market is plausible; add a radio later, not a redesign); and plan a multi-protocol line (two or more funded markets, highest cost, justified only when the markets are real) — with a shared sensing core making options two and three affordable.

One Protocol or Several? The Roadmap Decision Behind a Battery-Free Product

2026-07-20 by Mikel Choperena

Should a battery-free product commit to one wireless protocol or plan for several? A roadmap framework — and what adding a protocol later really costs.

From stuck to scoped: three "stuck" situations — a project stalled across vendors, a capability gap just hit, and a system built but not behaving — flow through a short paid scoping study into four "scoped" outputs: an architecture proposal, a realistic plan with an investment range, an integration-risk map, and an honest go/no-go recommendation

From Stuck to Scoped: How a Paid Scoping Study De-Risks a Cross-Domain Project

2026-07-13 by Mikel Choperena

A paid scoping study turns a stalled cross-domain project into an architecture, a costed plan and an honest go/no-go — the lowest-risk way to start before you commit.

Two-panel diagram comparing periodic inspection and condition-based maintenance of a high-voltage asset: on the left, calendar-based inspections miss a fault that develops in the blind window between visits; on the right, continuous battery-free condition monitoring catches the same fault at the action threshold and triggers intervention before failure.

Condition-Based Maintenance vs Periodic Inspection: The Business Case for Utilities

2026-07-132026-07-06 by Mikel Choperena

Condition-based maintenance vs periodic inspection for HV switchgear: what each really costs, and how to build a business case utilities will actually sign.