Ming-Bo Lin

Remote-Controllable Power Outlet System for Home Power Management

In this paper we describe the Wireless Power-Controlled Outlet Module (WPCOM) with a scalable mechanism for home power management which we have developed. The WPCOM integrates the multiple AC power sockets and a simple low-power microcontroller into a power outlet to switch the power of the sockets ON/OFF and to measure the power consumption of plugged electric home appliances. Our WPCOM consists of six scalable modules, that is, the Essential Control Module, the Bluetooth Module, the GSM Module, the Ethernet Module, the SD Card Module and the Power Measuring Module, which together provide an indoor wireless, and an outdoor remote control and monitor of electric home appliances. We have designed a PDA control software and remote control software which support the Graphic User Interface, thus allowing the user to easily monitor the electric home appliances through the PDA and the Internet individually. In addition, we use a Short Message Service to achieve control and monitoring through a GSM cellular mobile phone for remote use anytime and anywhere.

Power Monitoring and Control for Electric Home Appliances Based on Power Line Communication

Home power consumption tends to grow in proportion to the increase in the number of large-sized electric home appliances. An embedded system without any new additional wiring has been developed for home power management. By using power line communication (PLC) technology, electric home appliances can be controlled and monitored through domestic power lines. We describe a PPCOM (PTC Power-Controlled Outlet Module) which integrates the multiple AC power sockets, the power measuring module, the PTC module and a microcontroller into a power outlet to switch the power of the sockets on/off and to measure the power consumption of plugged-in electric home appliances. We have also designed an embedded home server which supports the Web page user interface, thus allowing the user to easily control and monitor the electric home appliances by means of the Internet. In addition, the field experiments reported have demonstrated that our design can be practically implemented and provides adequate results.

Estimation by Software for the Power Consumption of Streaming-Media Servers

The power consumption of a streaming-media server can be obtained in real time by using the virtual-instrumentation software described in this paper without using an additional hardware meter. We have built a model to estimate the power consumption from the observation of experimental data that consists of tracking the CPU utilization and detecting the operation parameters of the measured servers. When calculated in real time, the CPU utilization can respond to the dynamic change of the power consumption of the measured servers. The operation parameters represent the hardware configuration of the measured servers. We also propose three methods to obtain these parameters: filled- manually, hardware-revised, and software-revised parameter estimating. We have constructed the virtual-instrumentation software according to this power model to measure the power consumption of the streaming-media server. To facilitate the measurement process, we have also designed a suitable graphic-user interface for it. Our virtual-instrumentation software with three parameter-estimating methods has been tested by way of comparison with measurement results obtained by a power meter. The average power values of the hardware-revised method are found to yield mean errors of the estimate within 3%. The mean error of the software-revised method is within 6%. However, the filled- manually method may underestimate the power consumption by as much as 11%.

A Lossless Data Compression and Decompression Algorithm and Its Hardware Architecture

In this paper, we propose a new two-stage hardware architecture that combines the features of both parallel dictionary LZW (PDLZW) and an approximated adaptive Huffman (AH) algorithms. In this architecture, an ordered list instead of the tree-based structure is used in the AH algorithm for speeding up the compression data rate. The resulting architecture shows that it not only outperforms the AH algorithm at the cost of only one-fourth the hardware resource but it is also competitive to the performance of LZW algorithm (compress). In addition, both compression and decompression rates of the proposed architecture are greater than those of the AH algorithm even in the case realized by software

Remotely Controllable Outlet System for Home Power Management

In this paper, we describe a remotely controllable outlet system with mechanism for home power management. The system consists of four blocks: the Bluetooth power-controlled outlet module (BPCOM), the home server, the remote control and the GSM channel. Bluetooth, wireless system can control the home electric appliances wirelessly at home without new wiring. The BPCOM integrates the multiply AC power sockets and a simple plug-in low-power microcontroller performs the power on/off switching of the sockets. In addition, the power detection circuits are used by the Hall current transducer to verify home electric appliance power on/off status. For the power management module of the home server, we designed the software module by Visual Basic .NET, which supports the graphic user interface (GUI) to let users easily monitor the home electric appliances power on/off. We also integrate Bluetooth to receive/transmit between the home server and the microcontroller. The remote control also provides the users with the ability to control home appliances power on/off through the Internet and the GSM channel linked to the home server in order to receive the SMS (short message service) for the power management of the home electric appliances power on/off anytime and anywhere

Design and implementation of a socket with zero standby power using a photovoltaic array

This paper further enhances our previous research into reducing the standby power of electric home appliances. Turned-off electric home appliances generally still require standby power when they are plugged in. We present a way to reduce the standby power of a socket. Our socket supplies the appliances with power when the user turns them on. When the user turns them off, our socket shuts the electric power off and thus reduces the standby power. Our design, which uses an MCU, receives signals from a PIR sensor which detects the user approaching the socket. The MCU controls the SSR On/Off when used as an appliance switch for shutting off the standby power. A load current sensor circuit provides a signal to the MCU to keep the SSR on until the appliance has finished its work. The MCU monitoring program provides both automatic detection of the user by the PIR sensor and detection of the load current. The MCU with low-power technology has internal modules to simplify the hardware circuit design. The PV array is added in our design to reduce the consumption from the local electric power company. The standby power consumption of an appliance with our new design is 7 mW in a darkroom and less than 7 mW in a non-darkroom. When the illumination intensity suffices, the consumption is 0 W from the local electric power company.

PIR-sensor-based lighting device with ultra-low standby power consumption

In this paper we present a way to reduce the standby power consumption of a PIR-sensor-based lighting device. Generally although a PIR-sensor-based lighting device will turn on when motion is detected, and will turn off when the motion disappears, the device still consumes 1–3 W power when the lamp is off. In our design the device consumes 0.007 W when the light is off, and is not only easy to set up but also inexpensive. Our circuit supplies the lamp with power when motion is detected; when the motion disappears it turns the lamp off, and the electric power is shut off in order to reduce the standby power. We use an MCU which receives signals from a PIR sensor which detects any individual approaching the device. The MCU controls the SSR On/Off when used as a lighting switch for shutting off the standby power. The MCU monitoring program provides automatic detection of any individual by means of the PIR sensor. The MCU has internal modules to simplify the hardware circuit design. The circuit component count, cost and power consumption are low.

Design and implementation of a socket with low standby power

Turned-off electric home appliances generally they still require standby power when they are plugged in. In this paper we present a way to reduce the standby power of a socket. Our socket supplies the appliances with power when the user turns them on. When the user turns them off, our socket shuts the electric power off and reduces the standby power to zero. Our design uses an MCU which receives signals from a PIR sensor which detects the user when approaching the socket and the appliances. A power detector provides an MCU to control the SSR On/Off when used as an appliance switch for shutting off the standby power. The components we use are very inexpensive and consume less than 0.4 W. The MCU monitoring program provides both automatic detection of the user by the PIR sensor and detection of power consumption.

New path history management circuits for Viterbi decoders

Up until now the trace back technique and the register-exchange approaches are two major techniques used for the path history management in the chip designs of Viterbi decoders. The former takes up less area but requires much more time than the latter, since it needs to search the trace of the survivor path back sequentially. We propose an alternate approach that is based on the concept of a permutation network and implements directly the trellis diagram of a given convolutional code. Instead of using registers to store the survivor path data, all information is recorded in a permutation network, and the resulting circuit has a smaller routing area than the register-exchange technique and has faster decoding speed than the trace-back method regardless of the constraint length. In addition, it is more straightforward to realize the permutation networks path history unit than the trace-forward unit.

Measurement by the Software Design for the Power Consumption of Streaming Media Servers

The power consumption of the streaming media server can be obtained in real time by the virtual instrumentation software module described in this paper without an additional hardware meter. From the observation of experiments data we conclude that the measurement of the power consumption of the streaming media server depends on the CPU utilization exquisite dynamically and with some system operation parameters. We form a model to represent the power consumption with respect to the CPU utilization. By using the software method based on this model, users can perform the measurement of the power consumption of the PC at any time even remotely through the Internet. Once the required measurements are made, the acquired data can be immediately transferred back to the monitor server in order that the measured data can be analyzed in more detail. To facilitate the measurement process, we also designed a suitable graphic user interface. Our method has been tested through a comparison with the measurement results by means of a power meter