Energy harvesting sensors get marketed as install-and-forget forever.

Ours were too.

Then years of field data showed us the gap between lab conditions and reality: devices positioned in dark spaces without enough light or during long periods in transit or in storage were slowly dying instead of fulfilling their promise.

This talk is about the decision to walk that promise back: we now ship two of our solar-harvesting devices with AA batteries already inside, at the same price, because reliability beats a marketing line.

We'll cover what the field data actually showed, why "energy harvesting" and "indefinite operating life" got confused in this industry when they shouldn't have been, and what it cost us to admit the original design assumption was wrong.

A talk about the difference between a demo-conditions promise and a deployed-conditions guarantee.