EnrgTech

  Current sensing Current sensing  is very critical in electronic or electrical equipment. There are numerous methods of sensing current which include the Rogowski coil, fluxgate, hall sensors, shunt resistor, and current transformer sensing. Shunt resistor sensing is the most commonly used method of  current sensing . This is because it is very cost-effective can work in both AC and DC, and requires no additional equipment. As such it is a very affordable way of measuring current. Optimizing precision The use of shunt resistors presents a lot of errors. The resistance of the solder becomes an integrate of the sense element resistance and introduces a significant measurement error. High precision applications use 4-terminal resistors as well as Kelvin sensing to reduce this type of error. However, special purpose resistors could prove to be expensive.  Moreover, the size and design of the resistor are significant factors in the determination of the  sensor ...

  Low power IoT applications Most  IoT devices  are battery-driven making optimizing for power the top design challenge. This challenge is even growing harder with AI inferencing moving from the data centre to the edge.  Sensors   are increasingly being required to pre-process data to extract valuable data before sending it to the cloud. This further pushes the emphasis on power and reduction. Designing for low-power IoT applications   Understand the KPIs Understand the Key Performance Indicators. It is important to note that the KPIs for cellular IoT are quite different from those of smartphones with regards to networks, applications, and designing chipsets. Smartphone apps focus on uploading and downloading large files, performing voice calla, browsing, and synchronizing with social media platforms. On the other hand, typical  IoT applications  are considered “lazy” since they spend long periods in sleep mode. They only wake up when they have to...

  What is RISC-V? RISC-V has in the recent past attracted the attention of major corporations across the globe like Google, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm among others. It has thrown developers into a frenzy. What exactly is RISC-V though?  RISC-V  is an instruction set architecture (ISA) that is open source and based on RISC principles. In essence, an ISA is an interface between software and hardware. ISA defines the supported registers, data type, main memory hardware support, and the I/O model of implementation of the ISA. RISC-V was developed at the University of California Berkeley in 2010. It is a simplified architecture thus is well adopted for speed and low power operation. RISC-V based chips are therefore good for commercial applications. Getting started with RISC-V The LoFive FE310 The best way to get hands-on experience with  RISC-V  is through development boards that are based on RISC-V processors. One such board is the LoFive FE 310 by GroupGets LLC. The boar...

Industrial IoT and PLCs Industrial IoT is growing rapidly. However, traditional PLCs don’t offer sufficient flexibility and connectivity as required by engineers. Customizing solutions to achieve the required flexibility and connectivity is costly and time-consuming. More so, very few engineers have the experience required to develop a functional  microcontroller -based embedded solution. Programmable Logic Controllers   A PLC is a programmable controller that has been ruggedized and tailored to perform a specific process in an industrial application. The process differs from industry to industry. A PLC architecture incorporates the following; A central processing unit Digital and analogue input and outputs Power supplies Logic application Wireless PLC To build a Custom wireless PLC one would require the following; A CPU Input/ Output signal conditioning A Wi-Fi module One can build these components from scratch but that would be time-consuming. It is easier to utilize th...