  With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), an increasing number of
energy harvesting methods are being used to supplement or supplant battery
based sensors. Energy harvesting sensors need to be configured according to the
application, hardware, and environmental conditions to maximize their
usefulness. As of today, the configuration of sensors is either manual or
heuristics based, requiring valuable domain expertise. Reinforcement learning
(RL) is a promising approach to automate configuration and efficiently scale
IoT deployments, but it is not yet adopted in practice. We propose solutions to
bridge this gap: reduce the training phase of RL so that nodes are operational
within a short time after deployment and reduce the computational requirements
to scale to large deployments. We focus on configuration of the sampling rate
of indoor solar panel based energy harvesting sensors. We created a simulator
based on 3 months of data collected from 5 sensor nodes subject to different
lighting conditions. Our simulation results show that RL can effectively learn
energy availability patterns and configure the sampling rate of the sensor
nodes to maximize the sensing data while ensuring that energy storage is not
depleted. The nodes can be operational within the first day by using our
methods. We show that it is possible to reduce the number of RL policies by
using a single policy for nodes that share similar lighting conditions.
