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February 26, 2011March 9, 2011 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Freescale Home Energy Gateway Reference Platform

I’ve previously introduced Atmel / Mentor Embedded smart grid solutions, specifically Atmel In-Home Display hardware with Mentor’s Inflexion User Interface. Today, I’ll present Freescale Home Energy Gateway Reference Platform based on i.MX283 ARM 9 MCU, MC13224V Zigbee IC, 9S08QE32 MCU & MC34726 Regulator and running Windows® Embedded Compact 7. The home energy gateway is the interface between the utility-controlled smart grid and energy-consuming in-house objects. The graphical user interface (GUI) has been design with Silverlight. Functions of the Home Energy Gateway Collect real-time energy consumption from smart meter and power consumption data from various in-house objects Control activation/deactivation of home appliances Generate dashboard to provide feedback about power usage Provide control menus to control appliances Provide a ubiquitous link to the broadband Internet Freescale home energy gateway solutions allow every point of the smart home to be connected and controlled from a central point, enabling power efficiency and energy optimization. […]

November 29, 2010January 31, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Battery-less embedded devices with Power Harvesting

Embedded systems without batteries nor connection to the mains, is that possible ? The answer is Yes!. For ultra low-power devices, Power Harvesting (aka Energy Harvesting) may be an option. By harvesting the energy from vibration from people walking or cars crossing bridges, automobile heat, broadcasting waves, light, wind, etc.. it is possible to capture enough energy to power very small devices such as wearable electronics and wireless sensor networks. The illustration below show the multitudes of tiny sources of energy around us. Please refer to the table below to see what amount of energy might be harvested depending on the source. Energy Source Examples Energy per unit area Vibration Walking, motors, bridges 10-3 to 10-4 W/cm2 Light Lighting, sunlight inside rooms 10-4 W/cm2 Heat Body heat, vehicle waste heat 10-5 W/cm2 Electromagnetic waves Broadcasting, wireless LAN emissions 10-6 W/cm2 The two main advantages of devices that can be powered […]

November 26, 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

In-Home Displays for Smart Grid – Atmel – Mentor Embedded

I’ve just attended a webinar organized by Mentor Graphics entitled “In-Home Displays: Enabling Smart Grid into every home” with Atmel and Mentor Embedded. This webinar is now available on-demand at http://go.mentor.com/hAz8 This webinar is divided into 2 parts: Frederic Gaillard – Product Marketing Manager at ATMEL – gave an overview of Smart Grid and its different components and presented Atmel Solutions: MCU/MPU, wireless chips (Zigbee/Wi-Fi) and touch screen chipset. Gordon Cameron – Business Development Manager at Mentor Embedded – focused on the difficulties in developing a user interface for In-Home Displays within a short time frame and how Mentor Embedded UI design solution Inflexion could help greatly reduce the development schedule. There was no external files for this webinar, so I created 2 PDF with the most relevant slides for your reference: Atmel Smart Grid and In-Home Displays Mentor Embedded In-Home Displays UI Development Tools Frederic Gaillard shortly explained the […]