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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, September 04, 2009

Light work

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One of the struggles for industry supremacy going on right now centres around building automation, and the use of wireless controls and sensors. Some people’s automatic response to that is “Zigbee” but there are plenty of others. I wrote about this a few months ago, questioning whether now was the time for this general class of devices, including but by no means limited to those based on IEEE802.15.4, to achieve market “take-off”.
One of the areas of dispute is power; Zigbee devices often claim that you can power a low-duty-cycle sensor or switch with a coin cell for years, maybe as long as ten years, and that his is readily compatible with building maintenance practices. No way, says the opposing camp; batteries are unacceptable at any nominal lifetime, and what you need are energy-harvesting products that use, for example, solar cells to gather enough energy to report sensed values, or the action of operating a switch to generate enough power to send the command.
Thus it is, that my in-box has a promotional release from EnOcean – firmly in the latter camp in regards to power – claiming dominance in the building lighting controls segment, as evidenced at the industry's most prominent show, Lightfair, where, quote, “80% of the companies demonstrating wireless lighting controls at Lightfair were based on the EnOcean Standard.”
The pitch from EnOcean goes on to say, “Today, more than 100,000 buildings worldwide are automated using EnOcean-based controls ….[operation] without wires and without batteries… frees integrators from the confines and invasiveness that has stalled widespread BAS integration.”
With the IP controlled by a single company, and implementers belonging to a formal Alliance, comprehensive interoperability is one of the big claims, and the company allows itself a shot at other standards in which, “proprietary solutions [may] be marketed as 'compliant', [leading to] nasty surprises when devices are discovered not to work together.”
Wireless controls for building automation ought to be, in the vernacular, a “no-brainer”. The relatively slow pace of OEM-product introduction and uptake is slightly surprising, especially in recessionary times; it ought to save substantial infrastructure costs if adopted with conviction.
Warring standards don’t help, of course, but they are inevitable at this phase of any new technology introduction. Is this assertion of supremacy entirely believable, does EnOcean have Zigbee etc., on the run? Even in this specialised sector; too early to tell.

Related entries in: Communications | Components/ Interconnect | Power Management |

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