Istvan Novak on power integrity

A couple years ago my pal Bob Thomas over at Apple told me how Istvan Novak over at Sun Microsystems figured out a clever way to keep RF from radiating out the edge of the board. For years, engineers have put power and ground planes or two ground planes on the top and bottom of the board, so it makes an enclosure, a metal can that keeps the signal traces inside from radiating. Those same engineers noticed that when the edges of the boards were open, RF would leak out of the edges and cause problems with signal integrity, power integrity and EMC (electromagnetic compatibility).

Istvan Novak, here at the DesignCon show in 2014, figured out you should stitch resistors or RCs around the edge of a PCB so the RF would die when it hits it’s characteristic impedance.

So these same engineers would stitch hundreds of vias between the top and bottom ground planes, all around the edge of the PCB (printed circuit board). If they had a top-side power plane instead of two ground planes, they would stitch hundreds of decoupling caps all around the edge of the board.

Istvan figured out a problem with this scheme. See, if you have a via or a decoupling cap at the edge of the board, that looks like a dead short. Remember that RF reflects off a dead short. So what would happen is that the RF radiating out of the signal traces would hit the vias and then bounce back inside the board and wreak even more havoc with signal integrity.

Istvan figured out that you don’t want to just stitch vias, you want to figure out the characteristic impedance of the two planes, which you can think of as a big fat transmission line. Then you stitch resistors all around the edge of the board. When the RF hits the resistors, it dies with no reflections, since it just hit its characteristic impedance. If you have a power and ground plane, you leave the decoupling caps, but add a resistor in series to each cap. That way there is no dc power loss from all the resistors. Istvan patented this at Sun, but he insists he is not the sole person to see this. He mentioned several people that have also worked on this problem.

All this bouncing RF also raises hell with your power integrity. See, Bob Thomas described the RF radiating out of the board edge. When I mentioned Istvan’s trick to Howard Johnson, the famous signal integrity consultant, he said that what was going on is that the power planes were resonating and the resistors were adding damping. OK, but I knew my pal Bob is no slouch, and what he described seemed to be right.

Howard Johnson, shown here in repose at his Signal Hill Ranch in Washington State sees the RC stitching as stopping power plane oscillation.

Bob Thomas, a pal from my HP consulting days back in the 90s, was at Cisco when he told me Istvan’s trick.

Accordingly I arranged to meet with Istvan at the DesignCon show here in Silicon Valley. He was part of a panel discussion run by my old pal Martin Rowe, over at EDN and EETimes. So after the panel I put Istvan on the spot. Who was right, my brilliant pal Bob Thomas, who says it was killing leaking RF, or brilliant consultant Howard Johnson, who said it stopped the planes from oscillating?

Istvan smiled and said “They are both right!” He explained that if RF is pumping out the edge of the board or hitting a dead short and bouncing back inside, well then the planes are oscillating, they are intimately related. I really love this signal integrity stuff, or in this case, power integrity. Istvan also pointed out that these days you need so many power planes, you don’t get one big plane you can stitch all around the edge. For this he says you bring the power and ground planes close together, and close means like a 1-mil (0.001 inch) spacing. That raises the capacitance up and makes the transmission line formed by the plans lossy, which keeps them from oscillating and radiating RF.

Best of all, Istvan was nice enough to write me a follow up note:

“To get the basics about terminating planes, you can specifically look at “Reducing Simultaneous Switching Noise on Power Planes by Dissipative Edge Termination,” EPEP’98, October 25-27, 1998. I just realize that there is no link any more from my webpage to this paper, but you can get from this direct link:

http://www.electrical-integrity.com/Paper_download_files/EPEP98_DET.pdf

“As I mentioned during our brief chat, this paper and the subsequent patents, were not the first on the subject. One earlier paper is referenced in my EPEP98 conference paper as:

“G. Lei, R. Techentin, B. Gilbert, “Power distribution noise suppression using transmission line termination techniques,” Proceedings of the 5th Topical Meeting on the Electrical Performance of Electrical Packaging, October 28-30, 1996, pp. 100-102.”

“If you Google the plane termination subject, you will find other papers and other patents as well. One other thing worth mentioning: like every new solution, these inventions have their optimum time when they are needed and it makes sense to use them.

“The plane termination technique was very useful in the late 90s and early 2000s when many boards had large contiguous power and ground planes, prone to strong resonances. However, as system density continues to grow, we are now forced to chop up the power plane layers into many smaller puddles. Under these circumstances using edge termination becomes less attractive. If resonances are still making problems, a better way of using very thin laminates. See for instance:

http://www.electrical-integrity.com/Paper_download_files/DC02_HP-TF2.pdf

So thanks to Istvan, and Bob Thomas and Howard Johnson for making our power integrity more solid and reliable. I have a video about this as PCB202, and will back link to that as soon as it is posted.

DesignCon 2014, even the badges are cool

So I got to pop into DesignCon 2014, the signal integrity, test, and high-speed schematic and PCB design show here in Silicon Valley. In addition to seeing some great panels and vendor displays, I got to see industry favorites like Dave Bursky, Martin Rowe, and Patrick Mannion. Sure EDN has lots of nice coverage, here, here, here, and here. Most of my analog pals love DesignCon. It’s not just a show with hundreds of exhibitors; it is a conference with keynotes, classes, and panel discussions.

But the thing I love about these UBM shows is that even the badges can teach you something. I noticed the printed part of my badge was paper.

This badge from DesignCon 2014 is printed on paper.

Thing is, when I looked on the backside of the paper there was a thin plastic disk covering up something with a small bump.

In the backside, you can see a small disk in the center. What caught my eye was the small bump at the bottom of the disk.

So what is an analog guy to do but peel back the disk?

Peeling back the plastic cover reveals a spiral antenna and an RFID chip.

The RFID chip spans the end of the loop antenna, while the other side of the circle has the underside connection with 9 vias to complete the loop.

The white cover disk is applied over a clear disk that has a spiral antenna and an RFID chip. The clear disk is printed on both sides so the spiral can form a loop with a back-side connection with 9 vias on each end.

Here you can see that the RFID system is itself printed on a clear disk.

Here is a close-up of the underside trace and the vias on each end. This is all made from conductive ink that is printed on fast and cheap.

A close-up of the chip. It’s made by a competitor to Atmel, so I have covered up the logo or cropped it out from the previous pics. It’s not just a competitor; it is where my boss worked previously.

The RFID chip may not have encryption like Atmel’s RFID chips, not sure if show badges are a secure application. But it still astounds me we can afford to print antennas and chips on paper badges meant to be thrown away after the event.

Here is a side-shot of the RFID chip. It is powered by an RF field you apply to the spiral, and then modulates the energy received to communicate with the transmitter. There is no battery in the badge.

So there you have it. A show so cool even the badges can teach you electronics. The next big UMB Tech show  here in the Valley is EE|Live! which is a super-show that has the Embedded Systems Conference along with some other major attractions. Atmel is a sponsor of the IoT (Internet of Things) track and we are submitting at least one paper. I will be sure to attend as will the hundreds of embedded engineering pals I know in the Valley. And my own Analog Aficionados party is Sunday, February 9^th2014. Steve Taranovich is signed up, as is EDN VP/Brand Director Patrick Mannion.

Video: The Gingerbread Arduino

My pal Andreas over in the microcontroller business group sent me this great video showing the kind of fun non-technical folks can have with Arduino.

He writes:

My cousin who is a math/physics geek wanted to learn embedded  programming and decided to make an fancy gingerbread santa for Christmas using an Arduino. Turns out not only kids but also grownups play with Arduino. ☺

OK, so a math physics guy is not exactly non-technical, but it is safe to say he is not an engineer. That is the great thing about Arduino, it can get you started with some results the same day you start to play with it.

The January 2014 eFlea breakfast

My friends and I still get together for breakfast even when the Silicon Valley electronic flea market is shut down for the winter. The first one of the new year was Jan 11, 2014. We go to Bobbies in Cupertino, and feel free to stop by the second Saturday of the month. We eat outside so dress warm. When the eFlea is running in the summer, we get to Bobbies about 9:30 AM. In the winter, with no Electronic Flea Market we show up at 7:00 and hang out until noon.

The big news this eFlea was that Phil Sittner and Dave Mathis are designing an antenna analyzer using Atmel chips. Phil, who I wrote about before is doing the hardware and Dave is doing the software. They plan on going to Ham shows to sell the product once they perfect it.

Dave Mathis (L) and Phil Sittner are working on an antenna analyzer.

Phil has already hacked up some prototypes to help develop the analog part of the product.

Here is Phil after I prompted him to show off all the cool Atmel hardware he is using.

That’s an XMEGA-A3BU Xplained eval board on the left and an AVR Dragon debugger on the right. I am mad because he paid for the stuff rather than hitting me up for some samples.

Next show-and-tell was from a pal that wants to go un-named despite the statute of limitations being invoked. He found a box in a culvert 20 years ago and assumes it was someone disposing of stolen goods. I assume it was more like the PCBs I found years ago that probably just fell off a truck.

These ceramic Motorola 68030 microprocessors sure are pretty. They make a neat noise when you clank them together.

Google’s Eric Schlaepfer and mechanical engineer Dave Ruigh admire one of the gold-plated beauties.

These mixers work from 1200MHz to 1600MHz. There are two layers of them in the box.

Eric Schlaepfer looks at one of the boards from the mystery culvert box of goodies. The PCB is not Mulitbus or VME, it was some custom job.

John Haggis and his son Xander showed up later in the morning but did not disappoint with an Omron wearable blood pressure health monitor. John is the pal that went all the way through med school and decided he preferred engineering.

Xander and John Haggis made the January 2014 eFlea breakfast and brought a whole batch of goodies.

This Omron wearable blood pressure monitor is just the thing to monitor your health.

John Haggis also brought this waterproof Bluetooth speaker to show us.

John Haggis also has hacked a fone wireless charger into his Samsung Galaxy S4

John also had a neat ANKER battery setup to run the hacked wireless charger.

Here is a link to that ANKER battery setup.

After seeing all the smudges on that ANKER battery, I was quite the hero when I whipped out these Atmel screen cleaners. You peel off the little pad, which is a cleaner on the visible side, and then you can stick it down to the back of your phone. I convinced John to take 4 of them to form little “feet” for his gizmo.

Atmel has this swag giveaway pad. It’s the little one-inch square at the bottom right. You peel if off this card, use the top side to clean the smudges off your screen, and then the bottom side will stick to the underside of your phone or gizmo until you need it the next time.

Here is another screen cleaner pad Atmel gives away at events.

Atmel’s Director of Events Donna Castillo assures me if you come to her Tech on Tour events she will have some of these for you take home.

Lastly, my pal Martin DeLateur, the International Man of Mystery brought an older Sirius radio and dock. He snagged it at an estate sale. Problem is it got hooked up to 12V battery, and has some issues. We scratched our heads and offered some advice. We will see if he got it charged and powered up at the next eFlea breakfast, Feb 8, 2014, which is the day before the 2014 Analog Aficionados party here in Silicon Valley.

This old Sirius radio has some power problems we will try to fix by the next eFlea Breakfast.

Arc explosions illustrate the dangers of electricity

I wrote a blog post a while back about the difficulty or having cars with 42V instead of 12V batteries. I also pointed out the difficulties of distributing dc inside your house and to your house. It got picked up by EDN, and the comments were interesting. Someone challenged my assertion that 24V relays switches are less reliable. Sorry, I worked for GMC Truck and Coach as an auto engineer in the electrical group. Heck, just read any switch or relay datasheet and you can see you have to de-rate for dc and de-rate even more for higher-voltage dc. Someone pointed out the phone company uses 48V dc, and I had to explain that the 48V the POTS (plain-old telephone system) sends to your house is also high impedance, 600 ohms, so that make is much less arc-prone and easier to switch.

Others challenged my observation that it is hard to distribute dc in your house due to the fire hazard from the arcs and the same problems with switches and relays. Well, even ac has arcs that are hard to quench. Bigger dc circuit breakers have magnets in them to pull the arc one side and make it longer so it can break. Really big breakers, both ac and dc, have compressed air that blows the arc out just like your kid with a birthday candle.

So here is a nice video of an ac arc flash that should give you some idea of the difficulty of quenching an arc. Palo Verde had a horrible arc flash in 2008 that thankfully had no injuries. And here is a training video of an arc flash form the fine folks at e-Hazard.com

Here is another training video from Westex flameproof clothing:

And if you wondered if there was any glory left in the American worker, check out this high-voltage lineman working from a helicopter.

So that’s the trouble with dc. Since the voltage is not going through zero 120 times a second it is much harder to quench the arc. The operative word is “plasma”. That is what Fran Hoffart from Linear Tech taught me about li-ion batteries. He said that the burning lithium is certainly a problem. But the real mess is that a plasma ball forms, and that shorts out any other battery cells in the vicinity. An arc is plasma, and that is some nasty stuff. I mentioned to Fran that the iron phosphate chemistry lithium cells are supposed to be burn-proof. Fran looked at me with an expression that said “you can’t be that stupid” and replied “they all burn”. It is remarkable the difference you hear when talking to people who are making and selling the battery cells versus the people like Fran, that are making the chips to reliably charge the cells.

I guess that is why that outlaw biker told me that the only thing that he was really scared of was electricity. I asked why and he said “Because it can kill you and you can’t see it.”

Cure RF squegging with a Neutrodyne circuit

Some headlines write themselves, huh? Squegging is when an RF amplifier or MHz-class switching regulator starts cycling on and off. In an audio amp it is called “motorboating” since that is the sound it makes. FET amplifiers are subject to this, like old tube amplifiers. Both have a high-impedance input, the tube grid or the FET gate. A FET gate is capacitive, so any charge that gets put on it will be stored by the gate, moving the bias point of the FET too high, and causing squegging. The Neutrodyne circuit comes from 1920 vacuum tube amplifiers. It is one of the ways you can tame squegging. High Frequency Electronics magazine has a nice article about squegging (pdf). The best way to show it is a figure in the article, who I hope the fine legal team at Summit Technical Media will let me show you.

Squegging is when the input of a FET or vacuum tube floats up momentarily and shuts down oscillations. This make the output cycle on and off, called motorboating (courtesy High Frequency Electronics).

Trust me; you really want to click over to the article since it has the schematics of a FET amplifier that will start to motor boat, as well as several ways to fix it. The whole magazine is pretty good. While you are at it, think of signing up for a print copy of the magazine. You need to be an engineer or tech worker, since the magazine is audited by BPA, so the advertisers know they are reaching tech people and not random idiots.

Remember that these tips apply to high frequency switching converters. And regulators are getting up into RF ranges. I remember seeing an 8-MHz switching regulator from Micrel years ago when I worked at EDN magazine. You might be using one of these fast regulators for some extreme size problems. These high speeds do cause less efficiency, as the gate charge is getting shunted to ground, but the inductor you need with these fast converters is miniscule. That Micrel part still manages 90% max efficiency, but you can use a 0.47µH inductor. That is one tiny inductor.

So I assume the Micrel folks have solved any squegging problems in their part, but it is still a good principle to understand should you run across it. It’s like sub-harmonic oscillations in switchers with a duty cycle greater than 50% (pdf page 10, pdf page 5, pdf page 72. It might befuddle you if you have never heard of it and don’t know the steps you need to take to solve it.

Ground, earth ground, common, shield, and power supply return

A recent edition of Design News had a nice story about ground bounce causing problems in LCD panels. Poor or incorrect grounding causes all kinds of horrible problems in electronic systems. The first thing you need to understand is that silly little symbol on your schematic does not magically create an ocean of zero impedance. The ground symbols are just a convention so we don’t have to draw all the separate return paths in our electronic circuits. Many days I think it would be better if we did draw all the grounds as separate wires on our schematics.

The article above bemoans that LCD panel suppliers are connecting their power supply returns to the chassis of the display. The author seems to think this is bad, and I tend to agree, if I understand the problem correctly. He says the LCD panel people do this to lower EMI radiation out of the panel. I have to assume what is going on is that the ITO (indium tin oxide) transparent electrodes on the panel need to be at least ac referenced to earth ground, so they can serve as a shield for the EMI caused by the digital signals inside the panel. But he points out that these fast digital signals can cause the ground to bounce up and that causes memory erasure and all kinds of other problems.

Now a Ham radio person would know the difference between a ground, a shield, and a power supply return. Those RF folks really understand EMI and radiation and low-impedance, even if they are not engineers. Ideally you would have an ITO layer on the display that was continuous and connected to the chassis of the product. That would serve as an EMI shield for all the fast edges inside the LCD panel.

To reduce EMI you want the tightest shortest loops between current carrying conductors. So if there is a ribbon cable to the display, you would want a return line next to each and every signal line. If the ribbon is that twisted pair type that is even better. In addition to putting in power supply returns for the signals, what you folks love to call “ground,” you could also shield the cable by running it a conduit or wrapping it with copper tape. But you have to be very careful where you connect that shield to the power supply returns (aka ground) and also to earth ground, which is that third round pin on your wall plug.

The three grounds in your electronic system.

If you connect that shield in multiple places, it will start sharing current with the power supply returns. Now you have changing currents in space, and EMI. I am starting to film a whole YouTube series on schematics, and the first 6 shows are all on the humble ground. So remember, that upside-down Christmas tree that everyone calls ground—that is earth ground. Linear Tech has routinely used it as a signal ground on their datasheets and app notes for 30 years. It is absolutely wrong and sloppy to do this. They are chip guys, maybe brilliant chip guys, but they don’t do system design. If you try to take a product through UL or CE they would like you using earth ground symbols all over the place.

The middle symbol above is chassis ground. That is what you use for a chassis of a car or radio. Unfortunately car makers do use the chassis to return electrical signals, but they are getting smarter and putting in copper wires to make sure the return currents really do return. What we should be using for most all our circuits is the little triangle symbol. And yeah, the power supply common does connect to the chassis common, and you should show that on your schematic. And if your product plugs into a wall, you have to connect the metal chassis to earth ground, unless it is a double insulated product, in which case the plug need not carry the earth ground.

Stay tuned, I will start filming these shows in our new studio here at Atmel and will back-post to them on this blog once I start getting them up.

Two Atmel chips in the new Microsoft Surface 2 tablet

Crack Atmel sales engineer Stuart Cording brought to my attention a teardown of the new Microsoft Surface 2 tablet. While it looks very much like the legacy Surface RT, it is a complete redesign. There is another nice teardown over from my pals at iFixit.

The Surface 2 internals are a complete redesign from the Surface RT (courtesy iFixit).

I was delighted to see that the Surface 2 contains two Atmel chips. There is one of our high-performance touch controller chips, the mXT1664S S-series, and our 32-bit AVR chip, the AT32UC3L0256. I have a soft-spot for the AVR 232-bit UC3 chip. It’s got all the cool peripherals and low power from the XMEGA family, but it is a 32 bit chip. I know everybody loves ARM chips and we make a whole bunch of ARM architecture chips, including the SAM D20, but UC3 is a pretty sweet little chip itself, as evidenced by Microsoft’s selection of it in this cost-sensitive consumer application.

The S-series touch chip is a capacitive touch controller chip that provides high performance. It is based on the 32-bit UC3 AVR part, so if you want to write assembly code, you only have to learn once instruction set to use both chips that Microsoft picked.  Look to see our T-series chips start to show up on tablets. It raised the performance bar even higher, with precise 0.2mm stylus accuracy, as well as hover and gloved-hand multi touch. We did a little video demo and I asked the engineer if it could do multi-touch with one glove and one stylus and he proved it could.

So keep an eye out for more Atmel touch hardware in tablets, phones, and car dashboards. We had one engineer tell us that while we did have superior hardware, our touch algorithms were also far superior. So you can image how good you can make your display with good hardware and firmware from Atmel.

Single wire communication, with power too

I don’t like the term “single-wire communication, since you always need a ground path. My buddy Joe Betts-Lacroix worked on a system at IBM Research where if you shook hands with someone, your PDA (personal digital assistants) would exchange information like your business cards. The “one wire” was your handshake, and the return path was your body’s capacitance to earth.

Most times when you see “one wire communication”, they really mean two wires, they just don’t count the ground return as a wire. No matter, I still think this is a great technology. So I was delighted to see that Dick Cappels had a great article in Circuit Cellar on implementing a one-wire system using an Atmel ATmega8515 microcontroller.

You can tell Dick Cappels is the real deal since he actually builds the one-wire circuit he describes in the article.

This is Dick’s vamp off the Maxim one-wire products that send power and communicate to a device over a single wire (not counting that return path). This was dreamed up by Dallas Semiconductor, before Maxim bought them in 2001. What I like about Dick’s solution, besides his using an Atmel MCU, is that for a couple of cheap parts, you can do one-wire communications with any peripheral made by anyone, as long as you go slow enough. He calls it analog communication, which I also love.

This does not send a lot of power along with the bits; in fact, you don’t have to send any power if you don’t want to, but you should be able to scale things as needed. It is a subject near to my heart, since I dreamed up a system a few years ago to send power to a motorcycle headlight and communicate to the switches and gauges all over one wire. I will check out Cappel’s design, since we can all learn from each other.

Now a word about Circuit Cellar. You can read that blog post I linked to above, but the article itself is behind a paywall. I can attest, Circuit Cellar is worth every dime if you are a system engineer that is interest in hardware, firmware, and even mechanical hacks. It’s a little on the hobby side, but nobody will do your engineering job for you for 30 or 40 bucks a year.

I mentioned a Circuit Cellar article on a homebuilt DNA sequencer a while back—and I say it again, subscribe and pay the bucks for this great magazine. I thing they have a money-back deal, and best of all, for 230 bucks or so you can get all the old issues on a memory stick, and then add your pdf issues to that stick. Do be aware that it costs extra to get both print and pdf versions.

The Internet of things, stalk by stalk

The Internet of things (IoT) will enable profound improvements in productivity

Bob Dible is an engineer that now works on his family farm in Kansas. He describes the technological strides made in agriculture. “We generate GPS (global positioning system) yield maps using data from the combine as it harvests. That helps us determine what nutrients are needed the next season at various parts of our 4-square-mile farm. We then program those different nutrient mixes and locations onto the crop sprayer aircraft. As the crop sprayer flies over the field, it uses GPS to locate itself.” The airplane sprays out nutrients or pesticides based on the GPS programming. It dynamically changes the mix of fertilizer based on its location over the field.

The $900,000 Air Tractor model 802 has 1300hp and a payload of 9,249 lbs. In 2013 the plane can change its fertilizer mix every dozen meters. Dible, the former engineer, knows what is coming. “One day we will monitor and grow the corn on a stalk-by-stalk basis. When we plant crops, GPS with RTK (Real Time Kinematics) gives us 1-inch accuracy.” It’s not hard to see Dible’s vision even now. With today’s technology, a small autonomous robot could drive down the rows of wheat (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A team from the Robotics and Cybernetics Research Group (Technical University of Madrid) has built an experimental farm robot they dubbed the Rosphere.

Sensors on the robot could monitor each and every stalk of corn. Those robots can communicate with each other over a mesh network. A mesh network is like a chat room for gizmos. They identify themselves and their capabilities, and are then a shared resource.

But the real enabling technology is when we put all these mesh networks on the Internet. This is the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). If the robots that evaluate your individual stalks of wheat have a port to the Internet, you get a cascading set of benefits. The server computer on a farm can store and manipulate the corn stalk information. But it can also analyze those crop yields. And it might contact Monsanto’s computers to get the best price and delivery on fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides.

Figure 2. The tractor on the Dible farm, similar to this one, represents a capital investment of almost one million dollars.

The farm’s server computer can contact and execute automated negotiation with several silos in the area, to insure you get the best price for the crop. The tractor Bob uses on the farm has GPS as well (Figure 2). “GPS has really taken over in the past decade in farming. Not only do aerial sprayers use GPS, but we use GPS to spray with ground sprayers such as the John Deer 4720.”

One day ground sprayers will share information with the farm’s server computer. And that server can go on the Internet to order parts, or schedule maintenance on the mechanic’s smart phone while re-scheduling the driver’s time. Already the nearby dairy farm’s newest tractors and loaders “talk” to John Deere’s and Caterpillar’s local dealers.  “The dealers know where the machinery is, how it is running, and when it needs service,” reports Dible.

Perhaps your mesh network of corn examination robots finds a particularly virulent pest or fungus. They could go on the Internet and notify all the farms around yours, as well as the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). Perhaps you’re a cattle rancher. You use RFID (radio frequency identification tags) on each cow. Foreign countries might embargo your beef if any cases of Mad Cow disease strike anywhere else in your country. But with individual identification of the cattle, you can prove their provenance, and if your tracking systems are linked to the Internet, your sales to foreign markets will continue unimpeded.

Mesh network antecedents

There are antecedents for the mesh network and the Internet of things. In the 1970’s the American military was bedeviled by North Vietnam soldiers using the Ho-Chi-Minh trail to bring supplies south to support the war effort.

Figure 3. A patent filed in 1971 and granted in 1976 put vibration sensors into radio darts that could be dropped from aircraft.

So the Navy invented small darts that had seismometers inside (Figure 3, Reference 1). These darts could detect footsteps and vehicle traffic and communicated over a radio network. They formed a literal mesh, and although they did not connect to the yet-to-be-invented Internet, they did report to an overarching communications network.

The Mesh in space

The military benefits of a sensor mesh hooked to a network were apparent to people in the science and space communities. NASA Airborne Science operates a fleet of aircraft that can communicate with orbiting satellites (Reference 2). In 2004 NASA started missions that would allow the satellites, the aircraft, and ground stations to interact and communicate over a network. This lets NASA better track and understand hurricanes, polar ice conditions and other changing geophysical events. The real-time knowledge of events is an obvious improving, but a system like this also gives real-time knowledge of itself. Researchers might schedule a mission and only after the planes had landed did they see that the data form a sensor was corrupt of missing. Equally frustrating, they might not have seen that there was an event of interest they could have included in the mission if they only could follow it as the data was taken.

Figure 4. NASA uses the Global Hawk drone in a network of satellites and ground stations (courtesy Wikipedia).

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has made this NASA “network of things” even more useful. Now the operation of the Global Hawk UAV can be moderated and maintained by the network (Figure 4). While not the canonical “Internet of Things”, the NASA network, dubbed NASDAT (NASA Airborne Science Data Acquisition and Transmission) is an Ethernet network just like the Internet.

NASA connecting disparate things together such as airplanes, satellites, instruments, and ground control, presages what the Internet of things will do. With the NASA system, now the airplanes “know” what instruments they are carrying. The instruments in the plane can be fed location, speed, altitude and other flight parameters. The satellites “know” what airplanes and instruments they are connected to and the airplanes “know” what satellites are tasked to its flight. Missions can be far more dynamic and opportunistic. If ground controllers detect some condition or location, the instruments and airplanes can interact and modify the mission to get some important data collected. Flights can be changed in mid-mission by ground control, and all the varied implications will be “understood” by the interconnected instruments, airplanes, satellites, and people.

The Internet lets a mesh network see the future

The power of communications between networks is just one aspect that the IoT can do. Sprinklers are another application close to the hearts of farmers. Having sprinklers on a mesh network brings benefits. For instance, the network nodes that mount on the sprinkler could control and monitor water flow. They could report back to the farm server computer on usage and maintenance problems that reduce water flow. The mesh could even measure rainfall and adjust water delivery accordingly. The system becomes even more potent when you connect it to the internet. Now the farmer’s water system can connect to weather services that predict the rainfall. That way the sprinklers won’t waste water irrigating immediately before a big rainfall.

Industry Leads the Way

Industrial sprinkler systems for farms have led the way (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Crop irrigation systems have hundreds of microcontrollers in them. Now they will be linked to the Internet (courtesy Wikipedia).

Carl Giroux works for electronics distributor Avnet as a technical account manager selling into the sprinkler manufacturers. He estimates that a typical farm sprinkler setup boasts over 300 MCUs (microcontroller units), or about one MCU per sprinkler nozzle.

While industrial sprinklers for farms are already connected, they are a glimpse into what will become available for consumers. Ugmo makes a sprinkler system that is suited to golf courses and expensive homes (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The UgMO sprinker system measures ground moisture and adapts the water usage.

It has a network of moisture sensors that communicate over RF links to monitor and adjust water usage (Reference 3). This wireless sensor network can reduce you water usage 50%. With the constant cost reductions in electric products, you can bet this system will find use in more and more homes. You can also see how the next step is to connect this system to the Internet so home owners can get the same benefits as farmers and commercial installations.

The IoT helps consumers

Consumers will benefit the most from IoT.

Figure 7. This older pedometer uses sophisticated electronics to evaluate your motion and connects to your PC with a USB port. Future devices will wirelessly connect to the Internet (courtesy Wikipedia).

Dave Mathis is a software consultant in Silicon Valley. He advises his overweight friends to buy a pedometer, to keep track of how much walking they do (Figure 7). “Don’t get a 5-dollar pedometer— the sensor is a little ball and spring, like the tilt mechanism in a pin-ball machine,” he warns. “Get the 50-dollar pedometer.” Mathis notes the expensive pedometers use accelerometers, like a video game controller. These are much more accurate in counting your steps and level of activity. It’s only fitting that you would spend more money for something that helps keep you healthy. Of all the machines and gizmos you own, your body is the most important. Your automobile has millions of lines of software and dedicated hardware to monitor its condition. Your body deserve as much.

It’s nice if your pedometer can connect with your treadmill. That way the treadmill can adapt its routine to how much walking or running you have already done. Its better when your pedometer can communicate to your phone. Now the phone can tabulate and record your progress, and remind you when you lag. But it is a whole new opportunity when your pedometer can go on the Internet. Now your progress can go on your Facebook page. When you lag, your friends might send a tweet or email or even call you on a telephone to remind you to not give up. The exercise information from your pedometer might go to your doctor or pharmacy. That way they can adjust the dosages of medication based on your level of activity.

It’s pretty obvious that the industrial farm is leading the way for consumer technology. We can dream when auto makers talk about autonomous cars that drive themselves. But this is already reality on a farm. Dible notes that the tractors and combines use GPS to control steering. “This relieves the operator from having to concentrate on driving. It allows closer monitoring of the equipment which helps lessen mistakes.” Between seed technology, special fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, new methods, and improved control, farming is changing as fast as any other high-tech endeavor.  But it is also like working on an engineering program – lots of long hours, and attention to details. “The only thing about being an engineer is that you spend your time solving other people’s problems.  Now I have to solve my own problems,” quips Dible.

The IoT means safer roads

Already legislative bodies are having automakers look at having connected automobiles to provide for safer roads (Reference 4). The NTSB (National Traffic Safety Board) knows that having vehicles communicate with each other will help reduce fatalities. This technology might first be applied to trucks and busses. But the benefits are obvious for all vehicles. Even motorcyclists will benefit from connected vehicles (Reference 5). Every year, thousands of motorcyclist die or get injured because the other driver did not see them. With connected vehicles the motorcycle can have the car warn the driver of an impending collision. Autos might even simulate the noise of a motorcycle in the surround-sound audio system in the car, to help call attention to the motorcycle.

Having the vehicles talk to each other is just the first step, similar to an occasional dynamic mesh network. When the vehicles can go on the Internet, it brings all the same beneficial network effects. You can collect, organize and share data worldwide. This might be anonymous data, to alert highway engineers of a dangerous intersection. Or maybe you will use the data to automatically lower your car insurance rates, since you have so few near-accidents on the road. There will be no need to worry about telling your teenager to drive safety. The car will do that for you, and even take the keys away if he is being reckless.

The IoT in your home

All this industrial and automotive technology is poised to leap into the consumer electronics world. We are on the cusp of an interconnected revolution. Gary Shapiro is President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). He recently wrote an article about smart homes (Reference 6). He notes that the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and HGTV (Home and Garden Television) have partnered to build the first-ever high-tech smart home (Figure 8).

Figure 8. The HGTV Smart Home 2013 is intimately linked to the Internet and its own devices (courtesy HGTV).

“The HGTV Smart Home 2013 connects many of the home’s appliances and devices,” notes Shapiro. The outdoors has pool automation that controls lighting, temperature, and fountains from a tablet. You can operate the exterior awnings remotely on demand, but they also include sensors that automatically close the awning to protect against rain and wind. The garage door sends an alert to a smart phone when a door is left open, and families can control the home’s door locks remotely. The occupants can remotely program pre-set temperatures for the shower. The window shades are also connected, and you can raise or lower them remotely.

The Internet of Things will not only let each of these devices communicate to you, it will let them communicate with each other. That way, opening the window shades might cause the microcontroller running the shade to communicate to the air conditioner, to make sure the house stays comfortable with sunlight streaming into the rooms.

Shapriro notes “Who knows, we might surpass the The Jetsons, and the consumer electronics industry might revolutionize the concept of smart living altogether.”  If Dible’s farm can monitor and care for each stalk of corn, it’s not hard to see that our homes and cars will monitor and care for each of their occupants. The Internet of things is ready to let us make another great stride in human progress.

References

1 Theodore C. Herring, A. Reed 3rd Edgar “Acoustic and seismic troop movement detector.”  Patent US3984804 A. 29 Nov 1971.

2 Forgione, Joshua B, Sorneson, Carl, Bahl, Amit, “Network Interface Links Sensor-Web Instruments,” NASA Tech Briefs, pg 14, July 2013. http://ntbpdf.techbriefs.net/2013/NTB0713.pdf

3 http://www.appliancedesign.com/articles/93619-eid-gold-ugmo-ug1000

4 http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/23/19643634-ntsb-calls-for-wireless-technology-to-let-all-vehicles-talk-to-each-other

5 http://www.americanmotorcyclist.com/blog/13-06-27/DC_Insider_Vehicle-to-vehicle_communication_technology_is_coming_%E2%80%93_What_does_it_mean_for_motorcyclists.aspx

6 http://www.appliancedesign.com/articles/93643-association-report-cea-smart-living