PV-Tiles is a novel material that closely couples photovoltaic energy harvesting and light-sensing materials with digital interface components. The concept of PV-Tiles includes three layers - PV layer: organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells, interaction layer and control layer. These tiles are composed of digital elements—such as displays, sensors and communication—and photovoltaic materials that can be aesthetically layered on the tile, providing both beauty and the ability to harvest energy to power the digital components.

See the toolkit website and research project website for more details and related work.

By using the following step-by-step process you can build your own PV-Tile or you can reproduce our work.

*PV fabrication process

*Hardware design

*Software code: microcontroller, Sharp BoosterPackLCD SPI, C data structures of images, and gesture recognition code

This project is licensed under the MIT License, Oracle Binary Code License, Instruments Incorporated License- see the LICENSE and file for details.

The PV-Tiles fabrication guide, functional block diagram, printed circuit board design, analog switches MUX board design, prototype designs, MSP430FR5969 Ultra-Low-Power Microcontroller code, Sharp BoosterPackLCD code, a command-line image converter to create C data structures code, and gesture recognition code are all released.

• FitLab
• Specific
• Swansea University
• EPSRC