What can be measured can be managed

August 28, 2014 / News

How you can get a perfect fit, custom design product from Brainboxes.

Monitoring energy usage is a growing business, customers want to
know exactly how much they are spending on gas, electricity and oil for
heating, lighting and manufacturing production. Long gone are the days of
leaving the lights burning 24/7 now that power costs real money, burning the
lights equals burning the dollars. It is a truism that what can be measured can
be managed. Many people are installing meters to help manage their energy
usage.
gas meter using Brainboxes Remote IO
Our customer wanted to use ED-588 to count
clicks of a reed switch in a gas meter used in a community heating project. The
meter’s reed switch is a volt free contact that is pulsed open/closed according
to the temperature corrected volume of gas passing through the meter. The two
sides of the volt free contact are wired to an ED input and the GND terminal.
The ED-588 automatically
counts transitions on all its inputs. So far so good. The customer’s problem is
that he requires the count to be up to 6 decimal figures and it needs to be
remembered inside the ED even if it was temporarily unpowered.

Originally our ED products only implemented a 16 bit count that
is 0-65535 and there was no non-volatile storage of counts supported.
Brainboxes engineers had a conference call with the customer to understand his
needs and quickly came up with a solution that has now been implemented across
the whole ED range. First, a new 32 bit counting command was devised,
documented and thoroughly tested. The 32 bit count allows numbers 0 through
4,294,967,295 achieving 10 decimal digits. Second, the volatile memory
chip was upgraded to be non volatile storage having a trillion read/write
cycles and retaining data for over 200 years. 

So not only does this customer get a product ideally suited to his application,
but all future customers of ED-004ED-008ED-038ED-204ED-504ED-516ED-538 and ED-588 have the
benefits counter and persistent storage of counts. Customers who already have
these ED products can download the latest firmware and instantly upgrade their
16 bit counter product to have the 32 bit counter functionality.

Brainboxes ED-588 Remote IO
Over the next few months, we are implementing a planned list of upgrades with
the ED product range. We invite you to give us feedback or perhaps other
features we have not yet considered.

  • Digital I/O Tunnelling 
  • Modbus support
  • Rule based I/O
  • Analogue Tunnelling
  • Enhanced Network Security for
    ED range
  • Easily readable IP address
    using NFC from a smartphone

At Brainboxes we are very keen to work with customers to give
them a product that fits them as precisely as a made to measure suit. We are
frequently listening to our customers and providing custom solutions to help
them achieve their goals.If you require custom programming or hardware, contact
our sales team now
 to discuss
your requirements.