GSoC 2010: Smart Energy Monitoring Console

GoogleGroups
1

Hi,
I want to present my implementation idea and get some reviews on my
entry for GSoC. I have chosen Smart Energy Monitoring Console: The
ZigBee Smart Energy profile is a wireless standard for utility
companies and consumers to securely monitor and manage home energy
consumption by communicating directly with smart appliances that
report their power usage. By interfacing the Beagle Board to an MCU
and RF transceiver monitoring the energy consumption of a home and
it's appliances, the Beagle Board could act as a dedicated terminal to
track and control energy usage of power hungry devices

I am a Computer Engineering Student at the university of Texas of
Dallas with 2+ yrs work experience in Embedded Software development.

My Profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/arunsrinivasang

any comment or suggestions will be very helpful and I am also on the
lookout for a mentor.

Description of my project:

my plan is to come up with an efficient and low cost Energy
monitoring. This is something i have been working from my senior year
project. With the growth of energy thirsty population, smart energy
management, atleast at the domestic level is very essential.
My plan is to create a wireless Home Area Network (HAN) with multiple
nodes communicating in a full duplex manner. As suggested in the
Beagleboard GSoC idea I plan to stick to Zigbee protocol. ZigBee was
developed by the ZigBee Alliance, a world-wide industry working group
that developed standardized application software on top of the IEEE
802.15.4 wireless standard. Open standards provide true
interoperability between systems.ZigBee Smart Energy offers utility
companies secure, easy-to-use wireless home area networks (HAN) for
managing energy. Smart Energy gives utilities and their customers the
power to directly communicate with thermostats and other smart
appliances.

Each Zigbee node in HAN would measure the power consumed by the
appliance and the appliance is controlled by the node. I plan to
implement a control unit with a beagleboard interfaced with a RF
transceiver. The Control unit will a run a smart energy management
algorithm. The entire network will operate in a master slave manner,
wherein the control unit being the master.Since the beagleboard can be
connected to a network, the critical parameters of the algorithm
(Power tariff, cost, etc) can be changed on the run.

The advantage of this idea/project is that energy consumption trends
can be measured, we can get details and manage power hungry appliances
very efficiently.

I plan to do the nodes implementation on C and the control unit
implementation on C++ (I can be more flexible and modularize my
implementation).

2

Hi,
I want to present my implementation idea and get some reviews on my
entry for GSoC. I have chosen Smart Energy Monitoring Console: The
ZigBee Smart Energy profile is a wireless standard for utility
companies and consumers to securely monitor and manage home energy
consumption by communicating directly with smart appliances that
report their power usage. By interfacing the Beagle Board to an MCU
and RF transceiver monitoring the energy consumption of a home and
it's appliances, the Beagle Board could act as a dedicated terminal to
track and control energy usage of power hungry devices

Are devices already popular in the home that support this profile?
Will you also be generating a solution for act as a control and
monitoring node for each device?

I am a Computer Engineering Student at the university of Texas of
Dallas with 2+ yrs work experience in Embedded Software development.

My Profile:Arun Gopalaswami - MathWorks | LinkedIn

any comment or suggestions will be very helpful and I am also on the
lookout for a mentor.

Description of my project:

my plan is to come up with an efficient and low cost Energy
monitoring. This is something i have been working from my senior year
project. With the growth of energy thirsty population, smart energy
management, atleast at the domestic level is very essential.
My plan is to create a wireless Home Area Network (HAN) with multiple
nodes communicating in a full duplex manner. As suggested in the
Beagleboard GSoC idea I plan to stick to Zigbee protocol. ZigBee was
developed by the ZigBee Alliance, a world-wide industry working group
that developed standardized application software on top of the IEEE
802.15.4 wireless standard. Open standards provide true
interoperability between systems.ZigBee Smart Energy offers utility
companies secure, easy-to-use wireless home area networks (HAN) for
managing energy. Smart Energy gives utilities and their customers the
power to directly communicate with thermostats and other smart
appliances.

Each Zigbee node in HAN would measure the power consumed by the
appliance and the appliance is controlled by the node. I plan to
implement a control unit with a beagleboard interfaced with a RF
transceiver. The Control unit will a run a smart energy management
algorithm. The entire network will operate in a master slave manner,
wherein the control unit being the master.Since the beagleboard can be
connected to a network, the critical parameters of the algorithm
(Power tariff, cost, etc) can be changed on the run.

Can you talk more about what theories you will apply for the energy
management algorithm?

The advantage of this idea/project is that energy consumption trends
can be measured, we can get details and manage power hungry appliances
very efficiently.

I plan to do the nodes implementation on C and the control unit
implementation on C++ (I can be more flexible and modularize my
implementation).

What do you plan to do about the user interface? How will you create
the GUI? Will it be accessible via the web?

3

Arun,

What hardware do you expect to use to interface with.

I know some devices exist, but not too sure about availability.

Wrt mentorship: if the Minix project is not entered/selected, I would
be interested in this one. I have a good knowledge of networking,
although I have no real Zigbee experience (I teach network management
at a local university of applied science).

Frans.

4

Why wouldn't you interface directly to the OMAP on Beagle?
BR,
Leo

5

Sensors are probably not near each other. That means either going for
wireless or run lots of wires.
The latter is not too interesting in an existing home.

Btw: probably one of the most wired houses can be seen at http://www.bwired.nl/
I'm not sure whether I would like to have that amount of control and I
definitely would not expose it on the web.

Frans

6

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

Hi,

[snip]

I plan to do the nodes implementation on C and the control unit
implementation on C++ (I can be more flexible and modularize my
implementation).

  If you're lucky, there may not be much node implementation to
do - I'd second Frans's desire to see some concrete hardware
availability for the Zigbee devices you want - and you probably
want a pre-existing Zigbee SE stack, since writing one in the
scope of the project would be 'challenging'.

  It's also worth checking on how you're going to get your readings -
there are various people out there selling power clamps of varying
kinds, but worth making sure you can actually buy some before
committing to use them (or just fake your readings, of course :-)).

What do you plan to do about the user interface? How will you create
the GUI? Will it be accessible via the web?

Arun,

What hardware do you expect to use to interface with.

I know some devices exist, but not too sure about availability.

  FWIW, Ember-based Telegesis modules are available from, among others
Anglia <http://www.anglia.com/telegesis/index.asp&gt; and if no-one
can find a local supplier, I can probably source you some.

  You can probably get the project working using the Telegesis
AT command set, but I think SE itself is going to need access to
a real Zigbee stack.

  The Ember stack itself is distinctly proprietory. I might
be able to beg my contacts at Ember for a licence, but it wouldn't
really be in the scope of GSoC.

Wrt mentorship: if the Minix project is not entered/selected, I would
be interested in this one. I have a good knowledge of networking,
although I have no real Zigbee experience (I teach network management
at a local university of applied science).

  FWIW, I've had a bit of experience with Zigbee and I'd be happy
to help out if anyone wanted me to - we've done a bit of work with
AlertMe on their Zigbee-based home alarm system and I teach a bit
here in Cambridge,

R

7

> Hi,
> I want to present my implementation idea and get some reviews on my
> entry for GSoC. I have chosen Smart Energy Monitoring Console: The
> ZigBee Smart Energy profile is a wireless standard for utility
> companies and consumers to securely monitor and manage home energy
> consumption by communicating directly with smart appliances that
> report their power usage. By interfacing the Beagle Board to an MCU
> and RF transceiver monitoring the energy consumption of a home and
> it's appliances, the Beagle Board could act as a dedicated terminal to
> track and control energy usage of power hungry devices

Are devices already popular in the home that support this profile?

I found a few energy meters and monitoring devices in the Zigbee
Alliance
http://www.zigbee.org/Products/CertifiedProducts/ZigBeeSmartEnergy/tabid/271/Default.aspx

Will you also be generating a solution for act as a control and
monitoring node for each device?

I would like to to do both. The problem is there are not many
appliances that offer control feature. I think i will start off with
monitoring and later add the control feature if I find appliances that
offer the feature. Worst case even if the feature is not available the
appliance can be turned on/off.

> I am a Computer Engineering Student at the university of Texas of
> Dallas with 2+ yrs work experience in Embedded Software development.

> My Profile:Arun Gopalaswami - MathWorks | LinkedIn

> any comment or suggestions will be very helpful and I am also on the
> lookout for a mentor.

> Description of my project:

> my plan is to come up with an efficient and low cost Energy
> monitoring. This is something i have been working from my senior year
> project. With the growth of energy thirsty population, smart energy
> management, atleast at the domestic level is very essential.
> My plan is to create a wireless Home Area Network (HAN) with multiple
> nodes communicating in a full duplex manner. As suggested in the
> Beagleboard GSoC idea I plan to stick to Zigbee protocol. ZigBee was
> developed by the ZigBee Alliance, a world-wide industry working group
> that developed standardized application software on top of the IEEE
> 802.15.4 wireless standard. Open standards provide true
> interoperability between systems.ZigBee Smart Energy offers utility
> companies secure, easy-to-use wireless home area networks (HAN) for
> managing energy. Smart Energy gives utilities and their customers the
> power to directly communicate with thermostats and other smart
> appliances.

> Each Zigbee node in HAN would measure the power consumed by the
> appliance and the appliance is controlled by the node. I plan to
> implement a control unit with a beagleboard interfaced with a RF
> transceiver. The Control unit will a run a smart energy management
> algorithm. The entire network will operate in a master slave manner,
> wherein the control unit being the master.Since the beagleboard can be
> connected to a network, the critical parameters of the algorithm
> (Power tariff, cost, etc) can be changed on the run.

Can you talk more about what theories you will apply for the energy
management algorithm?

I plan to start as a monitoring algorithm, that provides appliance
wise usage statistics with history trends and build the control part
over the monitoring algorithm. (I will update this thread with my
complete algorithm in a days time....i am working on it)

> The advantage of this idea/project is that energy consumption trends
> can be measured, we can get details and manage power hungry appliances
> very efficiently.

> I plan to do the nodes implementation on C and the control unit
> implementation on C++ (I can be more flexible and modularize my
> implementation).

What do you plan to do about the user interface? How will you create
the GUI? Will it be accessible via the web?

I am think of designing the GUI as a web page.....my GUI development
skill are limited.....I will need some help here.

8

Frans,

I am currently working on a MSP430 and CC2420 based zigbee node
interfaced with beagleboard for another application. I am planning to
use the same node for this purpose.

9

Is this something that is available in-store or is it a dedicated
design? In the former case, can you spare a URL?

Frans

10

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

FWIW, Ember-based Telegesis modules are available from, among others
Anglia <http://www.anglia.com/telegesis/index.asp&gt; and if no-one
can find a local supplier, I can probably source you some.

I also found this one in Germany.
http://www.pikkerton.de/zigbee/ZigBeeSensorsActuators.html

Furthermore there is also Z-Wave.Alliance members also have several
products out.
What I found to be the issue is that availability it low. They seem to
be aiming at installers, not end users (or geeks).
Pricing is also not always very friendly.

You can probably get the project working using the Telegesis
AT command set, but I think SE itself is going to need access to
a real Zigbee stack.

The Ember stack itself is distinctly proprietory. I might
be able to beg my contacts at Ember for a licence, but it wouldn't
really be in the scope of GSoC.

There is some linux zigbee code: IEEE 802.15.4 stack for Linux download | SourceForge.net
not sure how good it is.

Wrt mentorship: if the Minix project is not entered/selected, I would
be interested in this one. I have a good knowledge of networking,
although I have no real Zigbee experience (I teach network management
at a local university of applied science).

FWIW, I've had a bit of experience with Zigbee and I'd be happy
to help out if anyone wanted me to - we've done a bit of work with
AlertMe on their Zigbee-based home alarm system and I teach a bit
here in Cambridge,

Then I think you are better qualified to mentor this than I am :slight_smile:

11

To me a web based gui also seems nice, as you could also do remote
monitoring/management.
Setting up a nice gui could be a project on its own though.

Several options exist here.
You could go for a traditional guil based on html/css/php/javascript
but you could also go for something cool and use adobe flash.
However the latter might easily drag you into a UI design projects.
What I found to work for me was Flex builder from Adobe.
And there is also Wt aka witty which provides a web based toolkit
(roughly modeled after Qt).
Guess there are more options that I either forgot or am unaware of.

Frans

12

>> What do you plan to do about the user interface? How will you create
>> the GUI? Will it be accessible via the web?
>
> I am think of designing the GUI as a web page.....my GUI development
> skill are limited.....I will need some help here.

To me a web based gui also seems nice, as you could also do remote
monitoring/management.
Setting up a nice gui could be a project on its own though.

Several options exist here.
You could go for a traditional guil based on html/css/php/javascript
but you could also go for something cool and use adobe flash.
However the latter might easily drag you into a UI design projects.
What I found to work for me was Flex builder from Adobe.

Please do not use Flash. Or at least make sure it will work with free
players like Gnash.

I do not know how the GUI will look like. But for controlling purposes,
it should be enough to change some values or select some modes/states.

In my opinion Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript should be good enough for
this.

But if you are not experienced in this area and you will not find some
free templates on the Web right away, I guess that this will take to
much time to implement, so a simple GUI – like a table with option and
value – would be sufficient.

And there is also Wt aka witty which provides a web based toolkit
(roughly modeled after Qt).

Guess there are more options that I either forgot or am unaware of.

Thanks,

Paul

13

Hi Arun,
  Will you be contributing MSP430 code back to the community also? Where do you anticipate the primary novelty in this project will be? Through what interface would the web interface be served? Would you use an available Wi-Fi interface for this? (If so, the console could be located anywhere in the home)
BR,
Leo

14

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

FWIW, Ember-based Telegesis modules are available from, among others
Anglia <http://www.anglia.com/telegesis/index.asp&gt; and if no-one
can find a local supplier, I can probably source you some.

I also found this one in Germany.
http://www.pikkerton.de/zigbee/ZigBeeSensorsActuators.html

Furthermore there is also Z-Wave.Alliance members also have several
products out.
What I found to be the issue is that availability it low. They seem to
be aiming at installers, not end users (or geeks).
Pricing is also not always very friendly.

  Absolutely, on all counts :-); Zwave does at least give you
mandatory interoperability for most of the devices out there, it
mostly operates in the 800MHz band rather than 2.4GHz, and
they're a lot easier to buy than Zigbee products - just not as
heavily pushed.

  I think TI does some devkits based on MSP430 + CC2420 which
are probably moderately available - TI devkits usually are.

  If you're serious about your SE compatibility,
<http://www.mmbresearch.com/rapidse_main.html&gt; is probably what you
want - it's proprietory, but does simulate everything you need to
build your own SE nodes and be reasonably sure they'll interoperate.

  In the end, I think it comes down to what you want to focus on:

  * If it's SE, build an open-source SE stack and don't worry about
     the UI: you will never get around to it.

  * If it's remote monitoring, use RapidSE for the SE bit and build
     the UI. RapidSE will give you a serial port based infrastructure
     for sending and receiving SE clusters so you can write a moderately
     generic interface which you can replace with real SE later.

    Of course, that involves persuading the RapidSE folks to give/sell
     you a license.

  * If it's Zigbee networking, just do your own and drop the SE bit -
     it's not greatly interesting and takes time :slight_smile:

  Either way, there's a lot of code to write...

You can probably get the project working using the Telegesis
AT command set, but I think SE itself is going to need access to
a real Zigbee stack.

The Ember stack itself is distinctly proprietory. I might
be able to beg my contacts at Ember for a licence, but it wouldn't
really be in the scope of GSoC.

There is some linux zigbee code: IEEE 802.15.4 stack for Linux download | SourceForge.net
not sure how good it is.

  Wow - thank you! I'd not noticed that before. Sounds like they've got
a fair way - frankly, if their code does what it says it does on
sourceforge, a node implementation and ZCL for that would make a
nice GSoC project on its own (I am guessing Arun would also want to
add support for the CC2420).

Wrt mentorship: if the Minix project is not entered/selected, I would
be interested in this one. I have a good knowledge of networking,
although I have no real Zigbee experience (I teach network management
at a local university of applied science).

FWIW, I've had a bit of experience with Zigbee and I'd be happy
to help out if anyone wanted me to - we've done a bit of work with
AlertMe on their Zigbee-based home alarm system and I teach a bit
here in Cambridge,

Then I think you are better qualified to mentor this than I am :slight_smile:

  I have no experience with GSoC, but I'm guessing there are webpages
somewhere, and if it's decently specified and Arun would like me to,
I'm happy to jump in ..

R

15

Frans,

The Node is a dedicated design.....I don't think it has been updated
in my lab's web page.

As for the GUI, I am going to stick with a standard web page / form.

Here is a problem I found. Even though there are a lot of Energy
Monitors and Control units in the Zigbee alliance page, there aren't
that many appliances that let us control them. As far as my knowledge
goes i can only monitor the power consumed by them using a energy
measuring IC like ADE 7751 (lot of options are available).

Leo,

I am going to write an application code on the node. I think that can
be given to the community. As far as the interface goes the
implementation on both wired and wireless can be done, I have been
working on socket programming for quite some time, I can make it work
for both based on the availability.

16

> Then I think you are better qualified to mentor this than I am :slight_smile:

  I have no experience with GSoC, but I'm guessing there are webpages
somewhere, and if it's decently specified and Arun would like me to,
I'm happy to jump in ..

R

Richard,

The GSoC web page for 2010 is http://socghop.appspot.com/.
I would be more than happy if you can be my mentor.

http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/home/google/gsoc2010

the above mentioned page has the mentor application on the left
pane. :-).

wrt to the Z stack I am using, I think its licensed to my college. So
i am not sure how it works for the open source agreement.

17

I am doing the application for beagleboard GSoC. I was caught off
guard in the following question

1. If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be
on the BeagleBoard.org community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs
in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be
answers received from feedback of members of the BeagleBoard.org
community, at least one of whom should be a BeagleBoard.org GSoC
mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors

i need pointer or opinions for my proposed project

Arun

18

Missed the Deadline....out of GSoC.... :frowning:

19

Arun Srinivasan wrote:

Missed the Deadline....out of GSoC.... :frowning:

  Rabbits - sorry; distracted by irritating bug here and didn't
realise the deadline was yesterday (I am still confused as to
how the mentoring thing works, sigh - will hopefully have
read up before next year),

R