Teams Corner - Athanasios Nichoritis

Athanasios is now looking for his first employment to apply and deepen his knowledge about networks within IoT. If you are looking for an excellent new hire or maybe even want to build on his expertise gained during his master project, you can contact him directly on LinkedIn or via Jörg Rehder at jre@tegnology.dk.

 

Athanasios designed and implemented a wireless sensor network based on NeoCortec’s NeoMesh solution powered by TEGnology’s SensEver Alfa thermal energy harvester resulting in an autonomous self-configuring and self-healing mesh network suitable for large scale monitoring applications like thermal solar panel parks or district heating monitoring networks.

 

We had a brief Q&A on his experience as part of the team and his future plans:

 

TEGnology: What made you interested in doing your masters’ thesis at TEGnology?

Athanasios: I was interested in the idea of combining networking/microelectronics with sustainable solutions. So, the potential to power devices with a constantly operating energy harvester – in this case, TEGnology’s products – sounded like a very cool premise for a thesis project. I wasn’t familiar with the Seebeck effect before and the process of how heat is converted into electricity, and I was very interested to learn about another energy harvesting technique besides solar panels. Learning about how thermal energy harvesting has a lot of advantages over solar in terms of being more reliable in certain applications and lower maintenance made me really enthusiastic about exploring this further with my thesis project.

TEGnology: How would you describe your experience doing your masters’ thesis with TEGnology?

Athanasios: It was a very nice opportunity to get experience in industry in parallel with completing my thesis project. I feel that I gained a lot of insight to the industrial working environment and being part of a team in addition to what I had experienced at DTU. I was happy for the chance to have something more like a real job/practical experience as my last step before graduating and beginning to build my career.

TEGnology: How was your experience doing your thesis in a startup environment different than if you had done it in an academic setting?

Athanasios: I felt there were more constraints and challenges. In an academic setting I experienced more flexibility in terms of what you can have for your minimum viable product and the focus on cost was more present in this industrial project. Another nice upside of working in industry is the access to the new network and technical insight. I definitely found that there’s lots to learn in industry that you will not learn in an academic environment.

TEGnology: What was the biggest challenge you faced throughout the course of this project?

Athanasios: The biggest challenge was probably combining the different sources of knowledge to one functional design. For example, combining the online available information with the insight I gained during calls and meetings with technical support representatives who provided additional files not publicly available. But it was very nice to have multiple people to talk about the project with and that support helped greatly in figuring things out and successfully completing the project.

TEGnology: How does it feel to be done, and what are your future plans?

Athanasios: It feels very good to be done, and I am looking forward to now finding employment and starting to work soon. I am hoping to find a full-time job in industry related to digital design/IoT and networking, maybe even use the knowledge gained during my thesis and continue that path.

 

TEGnology wishes Athanasios the best of luck on his future journey, and we are very grateful his contribution to TEGnology’s mission to “optimize energy efficiency using thermal energy harvesting” – in case you are interested in a demonstration of the autonomous sensor network developed and built by Athanasios you are welcome to contact Jörg Rehder at jre@tegnology.dk