Our OWL ran down the batteries after only 1 month !
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Posted Jan 29, 2010
by Steve Collis
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What is a Go URL?My wife and I have a small tradition of buying a joke Christmas present for one another. Sometimes they are just plain silly. For example, one year my wife brought me a book with the title “Everything Men Know About Woman”, it contained 300 blank pages! This year I got my own back and bought her a wireless electricity usage monitor called OWL. Naturally see was delighted, hmmm.
Anyway, I connected the OWL’s battery powered sending unit to the cable coming out of the electricity meter. Immediately my 16 year old Son wanted to see how high he could get the reading. (Yes, he takes after me). By switching on the oven, the microwave, boiling the kettle, running the dishwasher and turning almost every light and electronic appliance in the house he managed to get it reading over 10KW per hour! Of course I’m thinking, Wait a minute, this gadget is supposed to save you money!
Once the initial novelty wore off, it’s actually proved to be a semi useful gadget. The display unit lives in our kitchen and when we sit down for a meal, we’ll glance at the unit and see what its reading. If it’s ever much higher than about 0.5 KW per hour (this seems to be the standby range for our house) we have a little debate about what’s using the power. It’s certainly made us all more aware of the power hungry appliances (Beware the Dishwasher!).
All was well until last week when suddenly the OWL display unit went blank. A bit of investigation revealed the batteries in the wireless sending unit had run down. We’ve only been using it for a month, this is ridiculous! A device that’s supposed to encourage energy efficiency that burns up a couple of AA batteries in a month! Also the sending unit is attached to a cable that regularly carries 10s of Amps. Why can’t it scavenge power from the cable rather than running on batteries? This made me realise that most of our household gadgets (even those that claim to be energy saving) have a long way to go in low power design and energy efficiency, which brings me onto our next series of Tuesday Tech Talks web seminars on Low Power starting Tuesday the 2nd of February. www.mentor.com/tuesdaytechtalk
Dr Barry Pangrle, our low power expert, kicks off the series looking at Power Efficient Design Challenges and Trends. The series continues with detailed talks over the coming 12 weeks covering different aspects of low power system design and implementation.
Let’s hope that the guys who designed my OWL listen in
About Steve Collis
My first exposure to Electronic Design Tools was at GEC Telecommunications where I manually entered HILO netlists using a DEC vt100 connected to a VAX to simulate a gate array design which eventually became part of a System X telephone exchange. Even though this was tedious work I could see the huge advantages in modelling a design in the computer verses trying to breadboard it in the lab. I was then lucky enough to be able to get involved in the development of early IC physical design system using parameterised language descriptions to build layouts of standard cells.
Later on when I worked at DEC, I was involved in the early wave of RTL design using early language based simulators and synthesis tools and worked on the development of an early VHDL simulator. This early exposure to RTL design brought me to Mentor Graphics where I was lucky enough to be involved the adoption of RTL based design techniques and the significant changes to Gate Array, Asic, SoC and FPGA design techniques that have taken place over the last 20 years or so. More recently I have held various consulting and management positions and today head up a team of product specialist concentrating on high level design and functional verification across Europe.
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