Articles

In April this year, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) ratified a new standard – ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 – for wireless applications with ultra-low power consumption. The standard is optimized for energy harvesting solutions and, therefore, for EnOcean’s self-powered wireless technology. Together with the EnOcean Equipment Profiles (EEPs) drawn up by the EnOcean Alliance, this international standard lays the foundation for fully interoperable, open wireless technology comparable to standards such as Bluetooth and WiFi.

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Interoperability tests show that “smart objects” like smart meters and grid gear can talk IP to one another.

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Research engineer teaches some of the ins and outs of networking low-power embedded devices, specifically how to configure 6LoWPAN.

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Networked sensors are finding their way into an increasingly broad set of applications marketers have dubbed The Internet of Things. The following photo gallery provides a few glimpses of this diverse frontier in electronics and distributed computing.

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March 22, 2012 — SensorsCon 2012 was held March 21 at the Santa Clara TechMart Center, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Society for Quality Electronic Design (ISQED). This is the first such meeting focusing on sensor technology, with about 60 attendees. As a design conference, the focus was more on system design and architecture rather than on the underlying technology components that I am more accustomed to covering.

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Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

Organized by the Internet Society, and building on the successful one-day World IPv6 Day event held on 8 June 2011, World IPv6 Launch represents a major milestone in the global deployment of IPv6. As the successor to the current Internet Protocol, IPv4, IPv6 is critical to the Internet’s continued growth as a platform for innovation and economic development.

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Any device connected to the internet needs an internet protocol address, a string of numbers unique to it that identify it and enable it to communicate with the web. As the number of web-enabled devices grows, the old system of assigning IP addresses can no longer accommodate them all and will have to, in the very near future, be replaced by a new system of allocating IP addresses called IP Version 6.

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October 12, 2011 – The IPSO Alliance held a press event in the middle of their committee meetings in Santa Clara. The group is focused on IP as the interoperability protocol for Smart Objects. Smart objects, an Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing are no longer “future” issues, these areas are here today. These products are pervasive in almost all activities – energy, food production, asset tracking, health care, predictive maintenance, buildings and personal residence, defense, safety and security, and communication. The challenge to allow for centralized communication and telemetrics management is to have a way from all these pieces to interoperate. The goal of the IPSO alliance is to have inter-operation take place using standard network IP infrastructure for Smart Objects.
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As intelligent devices proliferate into diverse and special-purpose networks, the enhanced address space, routing and security features of IPv6 will be required for universal connectivity.
by David Ress, Sensus and Mark Grazier, Texas Instruments
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Smart grid technology is here, so how can manufacturers be sure their appliances are ready to participate? There are many different parts of “smart grid,” which includes all aspects of the power grid: generation (power plants), transmission (power lines, substations) and distribution (electric meters, and in-home devices), with a focus on enabling cost savings by monitoring and managing power consumption. The area that most affects appliances is automated demand response (ADR) and, for this, the focus is on the home area network (HAN).
by Geoff Mulligan and Vint Cerf
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