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Thinking without power Techno Talk From crawl-space conundrums to battery-free Bluetooth, join me as I explore how tomorrow’s AI-powered sensors might think, sense and communicate while barely sipping power, or even skipping it altogether. I feel that we’re poised at the edge, just around the corner from an inflection point. In the not-so-­distant future, we’ll be submerged in a metaphorical sea of ultra-low-power connected, AI-enabled sensors. In addition to granting us access to vast amounts of information about the world around us, these systems will be able to tell us not only when something has failed but also when it’s about to fail. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet (said Max, crankily). Smart homes? I should cocoa! The catalyst for my current crankiness is that we—my wife, Gigi the Gorgeous, and your humble narrator—recently discovered a moisture problem in the crawl space beneath our house. I currently hang my hat in Huntsville, Alabama, USA, which “enjoys” a hot, damp and humid climate. It turns out that the humidity in our crawl space is off the scale. If left unchecked, it would eventually lead to mould, which could compromise the structural integrity of the wooden joists and floors above. As I pen this column, I can hear a bunch of guys working under the house. They are in the process of encapsulating the crawl space. This involves laying a thick, punctureresistant vapour barrier across the entire crawlspace floor and up the sides of the walls (any seams are taped or heat-sealed). Next, a layer of insulation is added. The insulation we’re using is a gleaming, silver-foil-faced reinforced bubble sheeting that will make our crawl space look like the inside of a spaceship. Last but not least, they will add an industrial-strength dehumidifier that will run continuously to suck moisture out of the air and expel it into the outside world. Nothing runs forever. How will I know if my new (very expensive) dehumidifier starts to fail? Is it perhaps equipped with a battery of stateof-the-art sensors (eg, temperature, pressure, current, voltage, vibration), coupled with AI and sensor fusion, that can detect the onset of problems and alert me via a Wi-Fi link? 24 I should cocoa! Apparently, I need to periodically open the entrance hatch and crawl across the aptly named crawl space to physically inspect the unit, which will be positioned under the centre of the house. Suffice it to say that I’m wearing my frowny face. I’m also wearing my “I think I may have an idea for a new project” face. Miniature meets mighty As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, one of the great aspects of my role as a freelance technology consultant is that I get to chat with a diverse range of people about a wide range of things. For example, I recently spoke with Josh Elijah. Josh loves miniaturising things, and he’s obsessed with creating tiny electronics products. A couple of years ago, he turned his attention to designing miniature Ethernet routers. People loved these products so much that Josh co-founded BotBlox (botblox.io) with his brother Aaron, and the company has since grown into a multi-million-dollar business. Josh’s “latest and greatest” creation is an 8-port, 10/100Mbps Ethernet switch and router called SwitchCore. At just 1” × 1” × 0.5” (~25 × 25 × 12mm), this little scamp is ideal for many weight-, power- and volume-­ constrained applications ranging from drones to space probes. From prompt to prototype Do you design your own electronic projects? If so, do you also design your own printed circuit boards (PCBs)? If you enjoy doing this, more power to you! If not, wouldn’t it be great if you could simply state your requirements and have the project designed and built for you? To pull a random example out of thin air, I might like to say something like: “I have a dehumidifier under my house. I want to know if it stops working without having to crawl under there. Can you design a little gadget that plugs into the wall, senses vibration from the dehumidifier, and sends me a Wi-Fi alert if it hasn’t been running for a Max the Magnificent while? It needs to survive a humid crawlspace and be safe on household mains power.” Luckily, in my case, I already have this covered. My chum Joe Farr loves challenges like this. If I call him up on a Friday to pose a problem like this, he will have a board designed and on its way to being fabricated before the weekend is out. But what about people who can’t do this themselves and don’t have their own Joe on speed dial? Well, I recently spoke with Matthias Wagner, founder and CEO of Flux (flux.ai). Matthias tells me that the latest version of Flux can accept a prompt like my “I have a dehumidifier under my house…” Flux can ask supplementary questions if necessary. Once it has wrapped its AI brain around your requirements, Flux creates and deploys AI agents that perform its bidding, which includes designing the circuit, generating the schematic, selecting components and laying out the PCB. The only thing Flux doesn’t currently do is order the boards for you, but Matthias says the team is working on that. Battery-powered AI at the edge In the case of my hypothetical dehumidifier monitor, power isn’t much of a consideration because I can ride on the back of the mains power that’s already supplying the machine. But what about batterypowered AI applications? I’m glad you asked. The ECS-DoT chip is shown here six times wider than in reality. It’s actually only 10 × 10mm (roughly 3/8” × 3/8”). Practical Electronics | January | 2026 FIND ALL YOUR ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS IN ONE PLACE BASIC MICRO E L E CT R O N I C S C O M P O N E N T S U P P L I E R w w w . basicmicro . co . u k High-quality, genuine parts A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Mark Goranson, the CEO of a fabless (and fabulous!) semiconductor company called EMASS (https://nanoveu.com/emass/), based in Singapore. The folks at EMASS have developed a device called ECS-DoT, which stands for “Edge Compute Subsystem—Deep Optimized Tensor”. The evaluation incarnation is presented in a 10 × 10mm package; the production version will be available in a 5 × 5mm package, and a 2 × 3mm chip-scale package (CSP) version will be made available in the future. Unless those are a giant’s fingers, this Ethernet switch/router is tiny! Practical Electronics | January | 2026 Mark says that, compared with its leading competitors, the ECS-DoT operates up to 93% faster while consuming 90% less energy, all while supporting true multi-modal sensor fusion on-device. In real terms, the ECS-DoT can perform 30 giga operations per second (GOPS) while consuming a paltry two milliwatts. But what about the radio? Quite a few companies are boasting about their low-power Edge AI processors these days, particularly in the context of small, portable, or remote devices that operate on limited power sources such as batteries or using energy harvesting. What’s often “brushed under the carpet”, as it were, is the matter of connectivity—especially wireless links like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. In many IoT applications, the wireless radio link can dominate the energy budget. The dirty little secret is that communicating data can burn far more energy than thinking about it. For example, the processor might sip a few tens of microwatts while running an inference, but the radio can gulp tens or even hundreds of milliwatts just to say, “Hello, world!”. Recently, I heard about an interesting company called Haila (haila. io). Yes, of course, I ended up chatting with them. Their ‘claim to fame’ is extremely low-power Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for the Ambient IoT, which refers to a new class of ultra-low-power or battery-­f ree connected devices that can sense, compute and communicate by harvesting energy from their environment. The explanation they provided to me is as follows. If you use a mirror to reflect the light from a laser, this doesn’t require you to consume power (other than a tiny bit to move the mirror). Similarly, instead of actively transmitting a high-power RF signal, a Haila device can reflect or modulate an existing RF signal (or harvest ambient RF) to communicate. As a result, they boast 1000 times lower Wi-Fi and Bluetooth power consumption compared to conventional solutions. I commenced this column talking about “a metaphorical sea of ultra-low-power connected, AIenabled sensors”. Technologies like those from EMASS and Halia may make these devices real before PE we know it! 25