Google PowerMeter Dissected

Joe_Polastre — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:11:22 -0800

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.

Public Radio's Power Trip

Joe_Polastre — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:00:21 -0800

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.

What the Green Grid means to you

Joe_Polastre — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:52:51 -0800

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.

Storage Power Consumption Gets Noticed

Bob_Davis — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:19:59 -0800

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.

New Energy Agenda: More Power or More Savings?

Joe_Polastre — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:14:28 -0800

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:

Come to Amsterdam, Come to Berkeley, Be Pervasive

Joe_Polastre — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:09:52 -0700

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.

Energy Harvesting White Paper

Dan_Steingart — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:04:34 -0700

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?

GKmM Summer School, Germany

Andrew_Redfern — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:56:04 -0700

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.

OS X joins Windows in the Sentilla arsenal

Joe_Polastre — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:34:24 -0700

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.

Introducing Sentilla Labs

Joe_Polastre — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:39:41 -0700

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.