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.

i.MX283 takes care of most of the tasks including power management, network connectivity (Ethernet / Wifi), user interface, smart grid / HAN connectivity and 8-Bit MCU 9S08QE32 handle the box named ISM RF to handle the MAC Layer and RF protocol stack.

For further details about the overall smart grid solutions from Freescale, please read the Smart Energy Management with Home Area Networks presentation.

To get started with i.MX28 platform, check my blog entry for development resources for i.MX processors and for Zigbee support check out BeeKit Wireless Connectivity Toolkit on Freescale website. The latest release at this time is Beekit  1.9.19 .

The hardware and full software for this platform do not seem publicly available, so you’d have to contact Freescale or its representative in your country for further details. The other thing we know is that Freescale partnered with quite a few companies for this smart grid gateway design including Adeneo for manufacturing and software support on i.MX28,  MicroDoc for the optimized Java VM on i.MX28 and Prosyst with its mBS Smart Home OGSi solution for i.MX28 series.

You can watch a demo of the reference design below.

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