EnrgTech

Power and IoT The Internet of Things can now be considered a mature technology. With active devices hitting 9.5 Billion in 2019, IoT has certainly entered its golden age. Even so, IoT is still faced with numerous challenges one of them being battery life of IoT devices. Many IoT devices are powered by batteries that need to be replaced or recharged quite often. This hampers the devices’ convenience and flexibility while diminishing their appeal as well. Low power wireless devices come in handy in mitigating these challenges. Low power wireless devices Low power wireless devices incorporate technologies that enable them to consume lesser power without affecting their efficiency. This way they can gather and send data as required while consuming lesser power compared to other wireless devices. These technologies include;   6LowPAN IPv6 low power wireless Personal Area Network is based on inter protocol version 6 (IPV 6) technology. It can work with a wide range of freq...

Additive manufacturing of electronics Additive manufacturing has been around for three decades and has since come a long way. The revenue for additive manufacturing had reached $5.2 billion by the end of 2015. It has exhibited an impressive compounded growth of over 25% for the last decade. This rapid growth can be attributed to the huge improvements in AM and a wide choice of materials. Additive manufacturing is still a novel idea in electronics but is rapidly gaining traction. 3D Printed circuits 3D printing of circuits  is achieved through additive  manufacturing  which has for a long focused on standard materials like thermoplastics, ceramics, and metals. However, this focus has now shifted to internal circuitry and as a result, we now have materials that can build a functional circuit. They include conductive inks and a variety of base materials. Using a base material and conductive material,  3D printers  can produce electronic devices as a single c...

LED Modules Light-emitting diodes (LED) modules are LED self-contained devices that are designed to either function on its own or to plug into a compatible unit. These modules are mostly used in the development of both energy-efficient and portable lighting.  An LED contains several LED bulbs that are connected to a fixture that contains a battery or an alternative power supply which powers all the bulbs contained therein. LED modules can either emit white light or emit different colours based on the material they are made of. They are prominently used for advertising and signages but could as well be used for other purposes due to their versatility. Types of LED modules There are a variety of LED modules available in the market. There no specific parameters that can be used to categorize LED modules . They can be categorized in terms of efficiency, form, CCT, colour among others. Some of the common ones used in signage and advertising include; Side LED mod...

Blockchain technology Blockchain technology is barely three decades old, but it has completely changed global money transfer as we know it. It was first conceived in 1991 by a group of researchers who originally intended it to be used to timestamp digital documents to make it impossible to tamper with them. This concept was first put into actual use in 2009 by Satoshi Takamoto to create Bitcoin. Bitcoin has since spurred the adoption of  blockchain technology  for cryptocurrency, medical records, and land records among others.  What is blockchain? A blockchain is a network of computers that share a digital ledger that is duplicated and distributed across all participants in the network (nodes). That is to say that each node on the network has a duplicate copy of the ledger. The digital ledger keeps a chain of transactions since the creation of the network. The chain of transactions keeps growing as new blocks of transactions are approved and then added along....

Brushless motors Brushless differs from conventional dc motors in the sense that it does not have brushes. Commutation is done using electronic drives to feed power to the stator windings. They consist of a rotor which is in the form of a permanent magnet and a stator that is in the form of polyphase armature windings. A  brushless DC motor  can be constructed in two ways; one is by placing the rotor outside the core and the other is by placing the rotor inside the core. How a brushless motor works Brushless motors are driven by electronic drives that  switch  the supply voltage between the stator windings while the rotor turns. There is a transducer that monitors the position of the rotor as it turns and conveys the information to an electronic controller. The controller then decides which stator winding to be energized based on the position of the rotor. Electronic drives are made up of two transistors each phase which is run by a microprocessor. T...