Tuesday 30 September 2008

Batteryless magic

In the past ten years, at least a dozen of wireless technologies have appeared with the intention to cover the retrofit Home Automation market. Among them, Zigbee and Zwave seem having taken some advantages over the rest mainly due to the fact that any company can develop compatible products at relative low cost. However, even not being as popular and as broad adopted as the "Z" technologies, a German solution takes strongly my attention and makes me imagine very good successes for the next years.

EnOcean, a spin-off company from Siemens, was founded in 2001 over some unique patents that allow their wireless sensors work without batteries. At this point, I think that nobody could find any argument against the originality of such feature; wireless sensors that don't need of a human maintenance forever... The more I think about this, the more I'm sure about the success of this solution. But we technical people need to know more about how this magic works.

EnOcean, as Zwave, is the company that provides anyone wanting to develop products under the technology with the OEM RF modules and integration tools. Besides, EnOcean also sells the energy harvesters, the actual kingdom treasure. EnOcean acts then as OEM provider, promoter and owner of this technology, having created this year the enOcean Alliance formed by more than 25 companies (Siemens among them).

This technology was designed simple and easy to use. The product portfolio is formed by transceivers, receivers and transmitters. Transceivers and receivers are the most common devices; they need obviously of an external power source as they are always alert on the reception of a transmitter message. Transmitters, on the other hand, sleep most of the time and only wake up at the moment of reading values and sending data to the receivers and bidirectional transceivers. Needing much less energy to work than the receivers, EnOcean transmitters are specially designed to be powered by their patented energy harvesters. EnOcean wall switches take the necessary energy to send on/off (or up/down) commands from the mechanical action deployed onto the switch button and the scrolling of a magnetic ferrite into a coil. Temperature and humidity sensors are powered by small solar panels that can bring power even in conditions of relative darkness. EnOcean is even working in a wireless sensor that could take the power from the current generated by the Peltier effect.

But what could be limiting the adoption of the EnOcean technology? EnOcean compatible products seem having a relative success when combined with other building automation technologies as EIB, Lonworks or BacNet. Nevertheless, only the transmitters can be integrated with other technologies as only transmitters have unique addresses that make them identifiable in the network. In this case, the simplicity of this technology could be limiting the use of EnOcean's receivers in large intelligent networks. Besides, the price of the OEM modules is still expensive. Excessive price and the lack of addressing and acknowledgment at the receivers side could be somehow complicating the deployment of EnOcean wireless modules in standard home automation installations.

Some of the news coming from EnOcean could be pointing to the direction of solving some of these issues in the future. It seems that the German company could be working in a new protocol specification that would simplify the bidirectionality and addressing of receivers. Perhaps a wider use of this technology would reduce production costs and would let us users introduce this magic technology into our homes at lower prices.

Link to EnOcean website

1 comment:

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