Development of Proximity Sensing Power Management Units
Björn Cederborg, Oskar Nyqvist · 2008
The aim of this master thesis has been to investigate the possibilities made available with the introduction of user awareness and network capabilities to an ordinary wall socket. This is done by the usage of wireless network construction and Smartphones for control of said network. A preliminary investigation was performed regarding the possible gains of reducing standby power consumption in households. The investigation concluded that standby power consumption stands for an unnecessary high part of the total energy consumption of a modern household. A prototype with the purpose of evaluating the feasibility and use of user aware, controllable and networked power sockets has been designed and constructed. An application using Symbian C++ deployed on a Smartphone has been developed for control and configuration of the network. The information network is based on Bluetooth technology. The functionality of the finished prototype shows that the proposed concept is fully realizable but that the Bluetooth technology has some inherent limits that need to be worked around in order to achieve satisfying network performance.