Smart dust
Updated: 11/13/2018 by Computer Hope
Smart dust refers to small computers (microcomputers or nanocomputer) that monitor movement, temperature, lighting, and other environmental factors. The goal of the designers of the smart dust machines is to build a device that is smaller than a snowflake. While smart dust devices are still a newly evolving technology, the current goal is to design a unit that is one cubic millimeter in size. These devices need power and the current idea is to provide a solar panel or component that allows these tiny devices to convert heat into power. Since the collection of data is useless without being collected, these units communicate data via radio waves and may even scavenge signals that are intercepted from nearby television towers.