Sentilla blogs

Google PowerMeter Dissected

2009-02-10T11:11:22-08:00

A lot of green announcements have come down the wire this week, from IBM's "smart everything" to Cisco "EnergyWise" to Google's PowerMeter. With a number of emails questioning how the Google system works, I thought I'd explain it a bit.

First, a bit of background. Google.org is Google's philanthropic arm, focusing on innovations to make people's lives better. Energy reduction falls into this category; Google.org has invested in and supported numerous renewable energy initiatives and has funded Google's solar installation at their campus in Mountain View.

The Google PowerMeter ties into the new smart grid infrastructure proposed by President Obama and former Vice President Gore. Smart Grid is a project to replace all of the old, clunky meters on your home with new intelligent meters that provide information in real-time. Say goodbye to the meter readers trampling your lawn every month and hello to wireless and cellular communication directly from your meter to your utility (and hello to big brother).

While everyone agrees that the smart grid initiative will happen over the next few decades, when is always the question. Gore said at the Web 2.0 summit this year, we need "an ambitious clean-energy program (similar) to the Apollo Project to launch a successful moon landing in 10 years." The Apollo Alliance, for example, is one of several groups advocating an upgrade to the electricity distribution network and policy incentives to create jobs around clean-energy industries.

This is where the Google.org PowerMeter comes in -- when all these smart meters are finally deployed, Google has partnered with GE (one of a number of smart meter manufacturers) to provide the information to you in real time. Unfortunately, only about 200,000 customers have smart meters now, with GE looking to provide more than 25 million by 2015.

Furthermore, the information provided by the meters is no different than the information you have today. You can walk outside and look at your old mechanical meter, jotting down the readings periodically or even enter them into a spreadsheet (even a Google Spreadsheet!). The smart meters automate this "reading" process, but they don't provide any new information. For example, you don't know where the energy is consumed, and so a level of granularity is still missing. And even if you have the data, what do you do with it?

While I want to use something like the PowerMeter, I'm not holding my breath that my house will be part of the solution anytime soon.

Public Radio's Power Trip

2009-02-05T11:00:21-08:00

Public Radio is taking a look at the future of energy, with a week long "Power Trip" around the country to find innovative technologies. John Hockenberry, an Emmy and Peabody award winning correspondent on The Takeaway, stopped by Sentilla to discuss the Sentilla Energy Manager. I gave John a demo of Sentilla's system, and it was exciting to watch the reaction of the producers as we showed them exactly how much all of their equipment consumes (and costs!). John also got a tour of our facility to see how we develop our products.

With a Sentilla demo that showed exactly how much energy is consumed by John's laptop, you can see how IT equipment has a huge impact on our country's energy consumption. With all of us streaming videos from YouTube (like the one below), procrastinating by checking out Facebook, and doing research with Google, we're consuming energy. Both our laptops are consuming energy and so are the servers that deliver all of this rich content. With the granularity of the Sentilla Energy Manager, everything is measurable, from your home appliances to expansive datacenters and massive industrial processes. They all consume and waste energy, and all can be operated more efficiently by knowing exactly where energy is consumed.

Garry Golden got into the energy debate this week too, with a blog about "Ten unusual technologies that may power the future." Only one technology got a 10/10 rating for likelihood to have an impact in the next 10 years -- Silicon Valley Power. Golden emphasizes that Silicon Valley Power is the only technology that focuses specifically on energy reduction instead of new ways to generate power. Just like Obama said, the cheapest, cleanest, fastest form of renewable energy is energy management.

Both the radio interview and a video are available online. The video is embedded below, watch it to see why space heaters are evil! The radio interview is heard on The Takeaway website.

What the Green Grid means to you

2009-02-03T10:52:51-08:00

Sentilla is now a member of a data center energy efficiency consortium, known as The Green Grid. With data centers consuming over 1.5% of the United States' electricity according to the EPA, lots of people are interested in how to reduce demand in the data center. To better understand the task at hand, companies have joined forces to make data centers more efficient.

At Sentilla, joining The Green Grid comes on the heels of our Sentilla Energy Manager for Data Centers product announcement. One of my philosophies in the design of the Sentilla Energy Manager was a focus on integration -- it isn't just about collecting data, it is what you DO with the data after you collect it. That includes both analysis and advice, as well as systemwide synthesis such that energy is a first class citizen when making data center operational decisions.

With The Green Grid, we're focused on partnerships with other software and system vendors, OEMs, data center managers, and directors of sustainability. We're part of an ecosystem focused on sustainability, and the work of The Green Grid, their studies, and their meetings (The Green Grid technical forum is this week in San Jose) provide all of us with ways to work together. After all, with every IT system working together to curb energy demand, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".

Finally, most important is end customers -- having a forum to discuss how our data centers become more energy efficient, and working to provide energy solutions that have a net reduction in operating cost. Before you can become more energy efficient, you have to measure and benchmark where you're at (and, of course, the Sentilla Energy Manager automates that process for you). We're committed to one of the key goals of The Green Grid -- establishing the set of measurement standards that provide actionable energy information; especially information with fine granularity that maps out your entire data center so it is crystal clear what to DO next.

Storage Power Consumption Gets Noticed

2009-01-27T10:19:59-08:00

I'm pleased to see more attention being given to energy reduction, and specifically to energy reduction in data center equipment. An increasing number of announcements, news items and blogs are giving equal time to energy reduction – the lesser known sibling to alternative clean energy sources.

As Joe Polastre noted in this blog, the foundation of energy independence consists of two fundamental efforts – alternative, clean energy sources alongside the reduction of energy. Driving hard on both efforts is key to making progress on our goals here. With much national, and international attention paid to clean energy, it was gratifying to see some recent announcements regarding energy reduction.

One such announcement was from The Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, which announced last week that it was releasing its initial Green Storage Initiative (GSI) Green Storage Power Measurement Specification for public viewing. Having spent many years in the storage business myself, I know that the growth of storage is astronomical and its energy efficiency is weak. An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report to Congress reported that storage devices had the highest power consumption growth rate (191%) and the highest overall power consumption at 32.3% of the total data center equipment power consumption - making the potential of this initiative significant in the context of data center energy reduction. I applaud the initiative and will be interested in its evolution and ultimate implementation. But it also got me thinking…

The initial standard is around "storage power consumption at idle." A good start, but active power measurement guidelines are equally critical and these sound like they are still on the drawing board. Moreover, I’m interested in the implementation timelines and the ultimate motivation in having storage systems that adhere to these standards. Most of what I read about in terms of data center energy reduction is around servers – storage vendors have flown under the radar here and I think more progress should be made more quickly. Perhaps initiatives like these will shine a brighter light here, I guess we’ll see.

Finally, how will these specifications be measured and managed once installed? Will the systems ship with power monitoring capability or will they continue to run open loop when it comes to power management? Third party energy management solutions will be needed in the meantime, and should be used to better understand the current state of storage energy efficiency. The varying energy profiles relative to age, application type and capacity utilization make storage a prime target for energy reduction and should not be taken lightly.

New Energy Agenda: More Power or More Savings?

2009-01-20T10:14:28-08:00

This morning, like many, I was glued to my laptop watching President Obama's inauguration. I suffered through the many blips and hiccups of streaming Internet video that was clearly overwhelmed by the volume of people all trying to watch at the same time.

I've been following Obama's energy policies for the last few months. In this morning's address, Obama said "the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet." Certainly a strong statement. Following the inauguration, the White House released their agenda for energy and the environment. The White House's primary goal is to become energy independent, focusing on three main points:

New sources of clean energy
Plug-in hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles
Cap-and-trade program

That's not the full story.

As with any story, there are two sides. The goal of energy independence is no different. One side is "harnessing the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." But the other side is the reduction of energy that we use today. The problem must be attacked from both ends -- reducing our energy footprint while developing new, cleaner forms of energy. With both energy reduction and clean energy production, we can meet in the middle and reach our goals faster.

Saul Griffith gave a talk last week, where he evaluated his energy use from the perspective of an engineer (you may know him from Make magazine and Instructables). Griffith contends that the world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy. He has an interesting analysis on what it would take to generate our power from renewable sources in the next 25 years. For illustration, Griffith talks about the impact of solar energy, or "photovoltaics".

"Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years," says Griffith.

For just two terawatts, that's 30,000 square miles of solar cells. Imagine solar cells covering an area the size of the state of Indiana, supplying only 12% of the required renewable energy. Oh, and remember that the location of the solar cells should have plenty of direct sunlight all year round, otherwise the solar cells won't collect all 2 terawatts.

By Griffith's estimate, if we built all kinds of renewable energy non-stop in parallel for the next 25 years, splitting our energy between solar, solar thermal, biofuels, wind turbines, geothermal, and nuclear, "the land area dedicated to renewable energy ("Renewistan") would occupy a space about the size of Australia."

Don't worry, Obama's plan (from his campaign) acknowledges the need for energy efficiency. Energy Efficiency is "the Cheapest, Cleanest, Fastest Energy Source," according to Obama. Since the Department of Energy projects that electricity demand will increase by 1.1% per year, there's a need for increased efficiency to curb increased demand. The administration is setting an aggressive energy reduction goal -- 15% reduction from the 2020 projected demand by making our society more energy efficient. Other items include:

making federal buildings 40% more efficient in the next 5 years, saving $130b
invest in a smart grid to measure and manage peak demand
improve new building efficiency to 50% and existing buildings to 25%

So while clean energy may take most of the spotlight in the media, efficiency is just as important. Besides, who wants to live in Indiana or Australia -- full of all those solar panels?

Come to Amsterdam, Come to Berkeley, Be Pervasive

2008-09-23T11:09:52-07:00

This week, I'm super excited to give a talk at PICNIC. This is the TED of Europe and everyone from Richard Branson to Genevieve Bell (ala Intel) to Werner Vogels to a million other amazing individuals will be speaking. They all have a huge interest in changing the world, and they are doing it today. They're focusing on energy, environment, IT, media, and really everything else. I'm honored to give a talk in the presence of such luminary individuals.

My talk will focus on how pervasive computing is making energy management real -- no one really knows how or where they're using energy. While data centers are the current "fad", the real problem is managing the millions of inefficient things that are out there. Once you know where the energy inefficiencies are, you can then take action to manage them. Without knowing the root of the problem, you're shooting in the dark, and that's where Sentilla can tell you exactly where the problems exist.

Where: Flexbar I, PICNIC, Amsterdam, Netherlands
When: Friday, September 26 @ 9:00.

The press release gives some context (immediately below) -- although stay tuned to the bottom for the next event -- BAIA!

Sentilla, a pioneering leader and supplier of pervasive computing solutions, today announced that Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Joe Polastre will join other industry luminaries next week at the PICNIC Conference ’08 in Amsterdam, September 24-26. The annual gathering showcases the world’s foremost thought leaders, technologists, and innovators who will share their insights on media, technology, arts, and entertainment. In addition, the conference will spotlight cutting-edge products and services in demonstrations and panel discussions. Dr. Polastre will participate in a session entitled, “Internet of Things,” aimed at raising attendee awareness of a new ecology of pervasive computing solutions. In his talk, he’ll discuss how embedded intelligence in objects all around us can provide meaningful information about the things that people care about—like saving the planet—and provide insights on energy management solutions that can leverage energy harvesting to provide industrial manufacturers with “green,” maintenance-free solutions.

For example, metals manufacturing production consumes a tremendous amount of energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. In these harsh, non-stop industrial environments, up to one-third of the production costs come from the energy required to operate these plants. Thus, even a one-percent reduction in energy usage in that industry will yield savings in hundreds of millions of dollars, not to mention decreasing harmful environmental emissions derived as a result of that efficiency. Sentilla’s pervasive computing solutions are aimed at helping industrial manufacturers manage their energy usage, and thereby re-direct the energy efficiency gained to improve plant operations, increase production throughput, and ultimately achieve greater profitability.

But why stop there? I'll also tell you why this is important and how companies need to adjust their business models in the Business Association Italy America (BAIA) Forum in October. Organized by Marco Sgroi (who has done some incredible work with pervasive computers on the body to help in things like rehabilitation), I'm honored to participate in this forum back in the US. With Italian ancestry (my last name was originally Polastri, not Polastre, but was changed in Ellis Island), I'm thrilled to participate in this panel as a real Italian -- and entrepreneur! Hope to see you there.

Where: HP Auditorium, 306 Soda Hall, University of California, Berkeley
When: Wednesday, October 8 @ 6:30pm

The continuous decrease of the size and the cost of electronic devices is gradually making the vision of ubiquitous networks of wireless sensors a reality. After almost a decade of extensive research, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are in the midst of the transition towards industrial deployment in various application domains such as automotive, environmental monitoring, health care, building and industrial automation, energy management.

BAIA presents a panel of outstanding experts from the academia and the industry, who have played an essential role in the history of WSNs. The panel will discuss applications and business models of WSNs and will address questions such as: - what applications will drive the mass deployment of WSNs both in the short and in the long term? - what players will be most successful in the WSN domain and what business model will they adopt? - what are the main barriers before wide adoption of WSNs? - when will the deployment of WSNs happen in large volumes?

Panelists: - Prof. David Culler, University of California at Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Arch Rock - Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder Crossbow - Prof. Raju Pandey, University of California at Davis, CTO and Co-Founder Synapsense - Prof. Kris Pister, University of California at Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder Dust Networks - Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder, Sentilla - Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, University of California at Berkeley, CTA and Co-Founder Cadence Design Systems

Program: 6:30 - 7:00 pm Registration / Networking 7:00 - 8:00 pm Program

Energy Harvesting White Paper

2008-09-11T11:04:34-07:00

Pervasive computers enable virtually any measurement to be made across virtually any environment. But how would you power your network? What if you wanted to place the computer in the middle of a field? Or in a tree? Or in the desert? Or a cave? How long would the computer run given alkaline or lithium batteries? Could it draw power from its surroundings? Could it be packaged in a reasonable size?

These are not hypothetical questions. These questions arise with almost every customer interaction at Sentilla. After all, a pervasive computer is only useful for as long as it interacts with the world, and there are environmental limitations to primary batteries, particularly in extremely hot areas. These questions have also persisted for as long as pervasive computers have existed. They literally funded my battery research at UC Berkeley, and my thermoelectric device implementations at Wireless Industrial Techologies.

Luckily, Sentilla computers "sip" energy, and can be readily powered from environmental sources, whether it's the light from the sun, the heat from an exhaust pipe, or the vibration of a motor. Many energy harvesting solutions are cost competitive with standard batteries, particularly for large or remote installations where field maintenance is an unattractive option. At Sentilla, working with our partners, we have enabled java-based solutions to run primarily from the energy available in their environments, be they HVAC subsystems, aluminum smelters, or oil tankers.

As Sentilla begins to explore energy reduction with our customers, we recognize that it's important to keep the focus on reducing energy consumption for critical applications, rather than creating another subsystem where batteries must be continually replaced. To this end, we're publishing a white paper that introduces solar, thermal, and vibrational harvesting methods in the context of pervasive computing. We keep the science behind the harvesting techniques at a high level, but we give proper size and placement context. We hope this white paper provides an introduction to the exciting abilities that modern energy harvesting devices offer, and we think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the amount of work you can extract from an computer smaller than a can of Coke!

Read the white paper >>

GKmM Summer School, Germany

2008-09-08T10:56:04-07:00

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk and a tutorial at GKmM Summer School 2008. The GKmM Summer School is a highly selective summer program that brings the brightest minds around Europe together. Held at a remote castle in Germany, participants focus on heterogeneous networks, discuss the state of the art of sensing, and formulate new ideas and interesting applications. The program was very well run and had a good mix of lectures from unmanned vehicle control to wireless sensor networks. Most of the lectures were academic with interesting novel applications -- a very cool underwater unmanned manaray, for example.

My lectures took a little different approach; I focused on how pervasive computing was being used in the real world. The first talk covered applications like emergency response, logistics, and energy management. I've deployed applications in all of these areas, and discussed what it takes to implement a real-world pervasive system. I talked about my experience with the Sentilla platform and how it enables these applications and reduces time to market.

In my second session, I gave a hands-on lab demonstrating the Sentilla platform. In the three hours allotted for this tutorial the students were introduced to the Sentilla Perk Kit hardware and software including the Sentilla tools, mote architecture, debugging techniques and architecture schemes for building applications using Java on a resource-constrained device. Once the architecture was covered we moved on to how to define a sensor, using the accelerometer and the temperature sensor in the JCreate as examples. By the end of this tutorial all 8 groups were building real-world applications like a digital dice game, shown on Sentilla Labs, to an emergency beacon that could be used in search and rescue.

For more information on the GKmM Summer School here is the main page. It was great to see how quickly the participants picked up pervasive computing and built applications, and I'm excited to participate in more summer schools in the future.

OS X joins Windows in the Sentilla arsenal

2008-08-25T09:34:24-07:00

If you haven't been religiously hitting the reload button at the Sentilla Developer Forum, then you might not know that we've released Sentilla Software Suite version 1.1.1 for multiple development platforms. I switched to Mac early this year, and I was waiting with bated breath for the native OS X development environment. It is now here, with all the features available on the Windows version. And if you're a Linux guru, we also have an Ubuntu Beta release.

Included features of Sentilla Software Suite 1.1.1 for Mac OS X, General Availability (GA) release:

Full Java compliance with CLDC 1.1
Native Sentilla Work IDE
Firmware burning for both gateways and motes
Sentilla Hostserver for OS X for managing mote applications
Samples, tutorials, and cheat sheets
Download and run applications from Sentilla Labs

We received a ton of requests for OS X at JavaOne. We quickly released a Beta version, and now the full GA version is available. It is compatible with your Perk kit, whether you bought it at JavaOne or our online website. Sentilla Labs applications can also be downloaded and used with the OS X release. Go to the forum, download the Sentilla software update, and enjoy the native OS X goodness!

Introducing Sentilla Labs

2008-08-19T00:39:41-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post, the last couple of months have been filled with tons of developers talking to me about their ideas for pervasive applications. Sentilla has been busy building applications for large industrial customers, working to increase efficiency and decrease costs. But every once in a while, we come up for air and build some fun pervasive applications that we deploy in our world headquarters. With all of these applications, most with only a few lines of code, I started wondering: where should we put them?

This thought process has led to Sentilla Labs, a new website launched today that showcases all of the different applications that our developers are building. Sentilla Labs is full of developer-contributed applications (developers retain the rights to their ideas and code) with details on how they built the application, which sensors were used, and even code for you to download and try it out for yourself.

I categorize the applications on Sentilla Labs into three buckets:

Bite-sized versions of large-scale industry applications. One project is a refrigerator monitor. It uses two pervasive computers -- one inside a refrigerator and one outside -- to alert us when someone leaves the fridge door open. The same application has been used to retrofit large industrial refrigeration systems to save energy and control temperature.
Developer applications and prototype hardware. If you've wanted to set up a sensor to detect when your kids come home late at night, here's the plan. The Motion Detector project uses a Radio Shack infrared detector to alert you when there's movement. Think of it as a programmable home security system. You could extend it to turn your lights on and off, just like in your office.
Fun applications. No software product is complete without the presence of a game. And what game is more fitting than the classic, Pong. Built using accelerometers in the Sentilla Perk kit, two people go head-to-head and the score is shown on their pervasive computing "paddle". One of my favorite applications to demo!

Everything is built using Sentilla Perk which is available for $199. The kit comes with the full Sentilla development environment for pervasive Java, and you can download the code from Sentilla Labs and run it in a few minutes. Be sure to contribute your ideas back, we'd love to see what great things you've built.

Pigs, Green Buildings, High School Students, and Your Idea Here

2008-07-08T10:17:32-07:00

I have been running around the world over the last few weeks since JavaOne and our GA announcement, with two trips to Europe and some other trips around the US. I gave a number of invited talks, have spent time talking with visionaries and leaders like John Gage, and have constantly been revising the presentation to address all of the great questions that I've received. The presentation's focus on the impact pervasive computing will have on our society, how Sentilla's platform is leading this next generation of computing, what's in the platform, and how did we make it all fit inside a tiny embedded computer that has never been done before. I've also had a number of interactions with people working on some very cool projects -- including projects that I'm allowed to talk about publicly (those are always the most fun for me)! There's another talk coming up, this time in the San Francisco Bay Area at the SF Bay ACM meeting. More details on that at the end of this post.

First things first: John Gage, former Chief Scientist at Sun and new parter at Kleiner Perkins, has been showing off the impact of pervasive computing using his Perk kit. The basic premise is you can directly see the impact of all of your energy usage through pervasive computers deployed on all of your infrastructure. Then you can analyze and control it, and the world will certainly be a better place. John is heading off with Al Gore to speak on global climate change, and we're excited that he'll have his Sentilla pervasive computers with him.

A few weeks ago, I gave talks in Delft, Netherlands and in Copenhagen, Denmark. Koen Langendoen hosted me at Delft, with visitors from Amsterdam and some from as far away as Twente! Koen and I had a great discussion over dinner. The topic was "which research contributions will revolutionize wireless sensor networking?" Rather than give away his answers, I'll let you ask him in person the next time you see him. I'll give you a hint -- we talked about naming, macroprogramming, reactive radios, and (of course) MAC protocols.

In Copenhagen, I was hosted by Philippe Bonnet and I met with two students, Jonas Fonseca and Sidsel Jensen. Jonas is analyzing the behavior of pigs. I learned there are more pigs in Denmark than people! Just one pork producer exported over 4€ billion last year (and that's a LOT of $$!). This very disgusting and dirty project is all about making sure that pigs have the best possible conditions to reproduce (I believe the word "inseminate" was used about 1,000 times in my conversation with Jonas). There's lots of interesting technical problems that Jonas has overcome -- like what happens when a pig lies on your wireless transmitter and you temporarily lose connectivity -- and his data is now being analyzed by life scientists who are modeling the behavior of the pigs. You can see his data and more info at HogThrob.

Philippe and I also spent some time talking about green buildings. There's a lot of money spent to architect, construct, and certify a green building. But what happens once people move in? They open windows, move things around, and generally alter and destroy the green aspects of the building. Phillippe and I are now on a mission to change that -- let's ensure that our buildings stay green, energy efficient, and comfortable throughout their life, not just when they first open.

Sidsel is working on the modernization of computer science curriculum, especially for high school students. While you normally write some lines of code and the virtual computer prints something on the screen, Sidsel is working to make it physical. By using pervasive computers, she's physically illustrating computer science concepts like threads and recursion, making computer science much more interactive and fun. I'm excited for her work to make it into mainstream classrooms. Sidsel wrote a blog entry about our conversation, if you're interested in her side of the discussion!

Next Presentation: Let's keep the conversation going about all the great ideas for pervasive computing. My next presentation is July 16th at 6:30pm at the monthly meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM. Located at HP in Cupertino, the seminar is free to attend. Find all the details in the SFBAY ACM announcement.

General Availability of the Sentilla Software Platform

2008-06-24T01:13:44-07:00

Today Sentilla announced that our software platform is now generally available and being put into production with our customers. We started by announcing Sentilla's new vision for computing in October 2007. Sentilla engaged with a number of incredible beta customers that were courageous enough to start building their applications on the first versions of our software. In May, Sentilla released Perk, our demonstration kit, to attendees of JavaOne. The JavaOne developers have been active and building interesting pervasive applications for almost two months. Sentilla is now opening this software environment, both demonstration and professional versions, to the world.

Throughout this process, Sentilla has put together the world's only Java-compliant platform for embedded 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. That's a huge accomplishment, and now lots of applications are possible -- AND they don't require a PhD from UC Berkeley to develop, deploy, and integrate. This is tremendously important because customer can leverage the volume of embedded processors as well as their low power characteristics (most 8-bit and 16-bit systems can last over 10 times longer than a similarly equipped 32-bit system!).

While we're the only company that provides a Java-powered platform for pervasive computing, Sentilla also wants the rest of the world to be able to afford and build their pervasive computing ideas. For this reason, we announced two kits today -- Perk, our demonstration kit that allows developers to build small-scale proof of concepts, and the Sentilla Development Kit, our professional kit that provides all of the functionality needed to deploy pervasive solutions at scale. This includes lots of low power options, a full server environment, and a path to production by OEMs and System Integrators. Check out the differences between the kits.

For those that can't wait to get started, the Perk kit is available for just $199. It includes 2 pervasive computers, a gateway, and the development environment to get up and running. More information here. You also get access to the Sentilla developer community, which now has over 170 members.

Purchase Perk online or contact Sentilla's sales team to purchase the Sentilla Development Kit for commercial users.

Where facilities use (and waste) energy

2008-05-27T07:41:58-07:00

What do 15,000 Java developers have in common? Besides a love of object-oriented programming languages and an oddly-shaped mascot named Duke, Java developers act en masse. How do we know? Sentilla was commissioned by Sun Microsystems to instrument the Moscone Center in San Francisco with over 200 pervasive computers during the 2008 JavaOne conference. Sun wanted to have greater insight into the behavior of attendees during the conference so that organizers could adjust energy-usage in real-time and better plan for future events. Each morning, John Gage presented Sentilla's findings. At the close of the conference, he exclaimed, “We have enough data to establish new patterns of behavior.” For instance, Gage and organizers from Sun were able to correlate the actions of the attendees to spikes in resource consumption, coming up with ways to save significant amounts of energy. Gage insists that all future conferences at Moscone -- whether from Sun, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, or others -- should use Sentilla's solutions to minimize their environmental impact.

By knowing how and when people use a building's resources, energy usage can be tightly controlled. A new application brief from Sentilla discusses the impact of intelligent management, using resources exactly when and where they're needed rather than the wasteful practice of keeping everything on all the time.

Read the application brief >>

This entire application was built by Sentilla's engineers over the course of a couple of months using the Sentilla Software Suite and some custom hardware. We counted each person that entered or exited each room and monitored the environmental conditions including temperature, humidity, and light. Not only did we know when resources were in use, but we could also gauge the popularity of each session. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, told EVP for Software, Rich Green, "That's going to be your performance review for the year. I want to make sure that everybody stays throughout the session, and you'll get a pass."

Dual infrared emitters and transmitters were mounted to each doorway in the Moscone Center (shown to the right). The devices analyzed the patterns by which each infrared beam was broken to determine the direction a person is walking and count each entrance and exit. The devices were mounted using magnets; the units snapped right onto the doorways in seconds and removed quickly at the end of the conference without any impact on the facility. Additional pervasive computers were placed on the stages and in the audience to analyze the humidity and temperature. With these sensors, the analysis showed each time that the H/VAC system turned on to cool the room, and the frequency of H/VAC events was correlated with the quantity of people in the room. Light sensors also showed us when the lights were left on (for example, in the evening), and even the start and stop times of each technical session.

The data was brought back to a webpage, and shown in each morning's keynote presentation. Below is the data from the first day's keynotes, where you can see the first keynote had strong attendance while the second keynote occurred while other sessions were in progress and thus had more flux.

Further data shows us the environmental conditions in a session room. Using the temperature, you can see the H/VAC cooling events. Using the light sensor data, you can see the changes in light as each session starts and stops.

Want to know more? Read the app brief, now available on our website.

Let the Perk App Building Begin

2008-05-23T01:08:53-07:00

While Sentilla employees were decompressing from a very busy week at JavaOne, customers that bought a Sentilla Perk kit were already jumping in and building applications using Sentilla's software. Our development community is alive, with a lot of great questions about how to build various applications. There's also quite a few feature requests, such as Mac OSX and Linux support. We're working on it!

Jose, over at Kodegeek, was really excited put a few videos up on YouTube of his application running and experience with Sentilla software. The application monitors temperature. All of the code to run the app is in our developer forum, and its amazingly short. His comment was "Working with the motes is very fun indeed!" Jose posted a blog entry too, complete with the code the he wrote. The blog is in spanish, so be sure to brush up on your spanish language skills. Keep the applications and feature requests coming, we love them.

Here's a video of the motes running and sensing temperature:

A look at the code, IDE, and client-side application to display the temperature alerts:

JavaOne Final Day and Recap

2008-05-12T01:05:27-07:00

The JavaOne Conference is over, and we at Sentilla are proud about what we accomplished, and excited for the future.

The last day of the conference is mostly about James Gosling's keynote, sometimes referred to as the "Gosling Toyshow". He uses this session to highlight the latest Java innovations in a cool, fun way. Our demo held true to this vision, and even added some audience participation to the mix. We instrumented beach balls with accelerometers and threw them into the crowd. The balls proceeded to take a beating (as you might expect!) and every push, punch and punt was measured for intensity. What's more, the relative location of the balls was tracked through the crowd and displayed on massive video screens in real-time in addition to the acceleration data. We gave beach balls a voice -- which they used to scream out in pain... Here's the video. Skip to 48:30 to see the presentation in full. It was a great end to a great conference, and all that was left for us was a final furry of Perk kit sales, and then the clean-up!

To recap, Sentilla was truly pervasive at JavaOne. The conference started with the introduction of Sentilla at the first general session. We were named a 2008 Duke's Award winner that same day. We had three booths at the conference. We released our Perk kit to the JavaOne audience. And we were showcased in the final keynote.

All in all, a fantastic JavaOne. We can't wait for next year!

JavaOne Day Three

2008-05-09T02:00:51-07:00

Day Three at JavaOne brought more application ideas, and a video interview with Joe.

Here were the three coolest apps of the day:

An equestrian was planning on monitoring the muscle temperature and stride of race horses galloping around a track, which can be used to determine the optimal time to race.
Dishwashers in restaurants need to be calibrated so that they sterilize effectively; a customer was going to use the pervasive computers to determine when the washer is running at the proper temperature to ensure the dishes are completely clean before serving food on them.
Underwater archaeologists were going to use the computer to tag the location and condition of submerged artifacts and communicate with the surface in real-time.

In addition, our co-founder and CTO Joe Polastre was interviewed by Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, talking about the Duke's Choice award. The video was replayed on giant screens as people waited to get into the exhibit hall -- next stop Charlie Rose?

JavaOne Day Two

2008-05-08T02:53:54-07:00

Another great day at the conference!

Day two was really about cool ideas from customers at our booths. One of the great things about introducing pervasive computing to the Java Community is listening to the myriad new ideas that developers come up with. Some of my favorites so far:

A person with an exotic fish collection wants to measure water temperature, salinity, pH, etc., and turn on devices that will maintain optimal conditions of his aquarium.
A bicyclist wants to use the built-in accelerometer in our Perk kit devices to monitor his pedaling so that he can train at maximum efficiency.
Giving "You've Got Mail" new meaning, a customer is going to put a light sensor in his mailbox so he can track when the postman delivers.
John Gage (at right,) the MC of the JavaOne conference, bought a kit and spent nearly an hour at our booth churning out idea after idea. He's on a mission to help reduce needless energy waste and came up with about a dozen cool apps while just standing there (the guy is scary-smart...)
Someone has a tandem car garage and wants to use a sensor to indicate when his car is perfectly spaced so that he can fit two vehicles at the same time and yet be able to walk between them.

I just have been working the upstairs booth where we're selling our Perk kit (only at the conference.) I'll add to the list when I get a chance to go downstairs and find out the cool ideas coming from the show floor itself!

Pervasive JavaOne

2008-05-08T01:53:44-07:00

As mentioned by John Gage and James Gosling in the keynote on Tuesday, Sentilla has been monitoring the behavior of people in the Moscone Center. We know when they enter and leave each room and we know the environmental conditions in each room. Together, we have great data that is giving us a good sense of the resources we're using. For example, we can see each time the H/VAC system turns on, we can see an increase in temperature when people (where each person is the equivalent of a 100W light bulb) enter a room, and we can see when the Moscone Center forgets to turn off the lights at night. These are just a few of the interesting bits of information.

To explain this to the audience, Gosling held up a Sentilla pervasive computer in the opening remarks on Tuesday to illustrate how we're injecting intelligence into the real world. Gosling and Gage also showed data that we collected on Monday.

Rich Green followed Gage and Gosling with his keynote that featured Amazon, Sony Ericcson, and others. At the beginning, Green joked, "Jonathan Schwartz turned to me. I don't know if you saw the demo where people are counted going in and out of a room. He turned to me and said 'That's going to be your performance review for the year. I want to make sure that everybody stays throughout the session, and you'll get a pass.'"

Tomorrow, to close the conference, we're going to show the data and Green will get to see his performance review. To be specific, John Gage will show the data to the attendees when he opens Friday's keynote. But that's not all. Sentilla is going to make the audience part of a pervasive application during James Gosling's keynote, where I'll be on stage with Gosling to explain what Sentilla is doing. Be sure to show up and sit up front (or watch on the web) to see more of how we're engaging people and things around us, and how we're turning "dumb" objects into smart things.

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today...

2008-05-07T13:47:13-07:00

Let's just say that the coolest thing today at JavaOne was Sentilla.

Today is just Day 1! We have tons planned for the next few days. Stay tuned.

"The coolest thing I saw today was Sentilla"

Way more updates coming...

Sentilla Wins Duke Award at JavaOne 2008

2008-05-07T05:29:12-07:00

I had the pleasure of receiving the Duke Award tonight for Sentilla. The Duke Award is given by James Gosling, the father of Java, and is the biggest award that a company can receive. The Duke Award is the only award given out at JavaOne, a conference with hundreds of exhibitors and over 15,000 attendees. The Duke Award goes to Sentilla!

Congrats to Sentilla and the Sentilla team. We have achieved something that no other company has done--putting a full Java system on 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. We have opened this world up to Java programmers, a huge accomplishment. On behalf of myself and Rob and Cory, we are so proud of "achieving the impossible". I remember when, 3 years ago, our advisors told us that Java was not possible on miniature pervasive computers. 10kb memory and Java? Yes. We proved Java is possible and the way to go. Today is a proud day -- we have proved everyone wrong. We have put Java on the world's smallest computers. Java runs with no compromises -- we have not pared anything back. If your application runs on any other certified Java ME system, it will work with Sentilla.

James Gosling talking about the impact of Java while giving Sentilla the Duke Award...