The energy computer: A novel Internet-of-Things (IoT) device for improved energy productivity

The Energy Computer, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) device for monitoring the behaviour of electrical machinery by analyzing the electrical parameters in real-time is presented. In order to achieve this while maintaining low energy footprint, we designed and built a Virtual Machine Operating System (VMOS) with extremely low memory footprint, consequently low energy footprint. Applications for aggregating and analyzing data in real-time can be downloaded to the device and executed on the top of VMOS. One or more such applications, executing on the device, can perform real-time data aggregation and analysis by implementing algorithms and logic specific to an industry domain or specific to a class of industrial machinery. The device is built using a dual microcontroller architecture, the primary microcontroller featuring Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) technology, executes our VMOS as well as its apps that perform real-time data analysis. The secondary microcontroller provides a full WiFi-based network stack for data access even when Internet connectivity is absent. The entire hardware and software for the device has been designed and built from ground up. The device has been thoroughly field tested in small and medium-sized industrial units in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore.