Eterna

Inspiration

Museums preserve humanity’s most valuable artifacts — but their monitoring systems are decades behind. From our interviews, 100% of institutions cited battery failure and manual data collection as core pain points . We saw a clear gap: preservation is critical, but the infrastructure protecting it is broken.

What it does

Eterna is a self-powered environmental monitoring system for museums and archives. It continuously tracks temperature, humidity, and UV at the artifact level — no battery swaps, no manual downloads, no blind spots. Real-time data flows into a spatial dashboard for alerts, analytics, and preservation decisions.

How we built it

We built a full-stack system:

Custom PCB using RF energy harvesting (Powercast P1110B)
Ultra-low-power sensing + MCU + LoRa communication
Energy-aware firmware with duty-cycled operation
Web app for real-time monitoring + spatial visualization Our Rev 2 hardware is already power-positive at ~1.5m in real-world conditions .

Challenges we ran into

Designing within extreme micro-watt power constraints
RF propagation in dense museum environments (walls, cases, metal)
Balancing transmission frequency vs. energy budget
Making deep-tech hardware feel simple and usable for non-technical users

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working energy-harvesting sensor node
Achieved ~200× improvement in RF harvesting efficiency across iterations
Conducted 10+ institutional interviews to validate real pain points
Selected to present at AIC-CAC 2026
Won M&T Summit Overall + Viewer’s Choice

What we learned

The hardest problems sit at the intersection of hardware, software, and workflow
Ultra-low-power design requires system-level thinking, not component-level tweaks
Real user insight matters — the problem wasn’t sensing, it was maintenance + usability
“Unsexy” industries often have the biggest unmet opportunities

What's next for Eterna

Optimize hardware for true continuous, long-term deployment
Launch pilot programs with museums and archives
Expand software into alerts, analytics, and HVAC control
Scale from a sensing product into a full preservation infrastructure platform