Intel IoT Roadshow Boston. Greentown Labs, Somerville.

Very much enjoyed the Boston Intel Iot Roadshow weekend of March 15 at Greentown Labs in Somerville.

That is me in the center. Always enjoy it when my picture features prominently like at MIT OHS2013 *silly-grin*.

Many thanks to Stewart Christie, Daniel Holmlund, Ajay Mungara and the whole Intel ioT Roadshow team.

Intel Edison kits and Seeed Studio Grove accessories were great. Wished could have more effectively used Mashery and could do something with the advanced release Grove Agricultural Sensor kit.

And here are the hackathon results. Great stuff overall. The winning entries truly were fun.

Our team was the "Drips" was supposed to be "Know Drips" and was actually more about larger flows then drips... but hey.

Power Cord User Interface Design.

Using the power cord as a user interface, UI, from the MIT Tangible Media Group, is interesting in many ways:

• Transparent design ala Norman.
• Energy monitoring and such (why not also put in a current monitor?).
• Microcontrollers and embedded systems. Related to IoT

Have always been in favor of cables... Like 802.3af Power over Ethernet, Standard USB power.

IQ Power Xpert meters - Westinghouse, Cutler-Hammer, Eaton, INCOM - brought to TCPIP.

Have a bunch of IQ meters and/or switchgear? - maybe branded Westinghouse, Cutler-Hammer or Eaton?... Know the meters? - They are the ubiquitous first generation digital meters in practically every facility. Either one has never networked these meters (though one might have a blue INCOM line running between them one barely even recognizes), or one has soldiered through the ups and downs of the Power Xpert software gateway architecture running on PCs.

Have in mind that the only way out to the future is to upgrade the meters, but that would be a major project with shutdowns and swap outs. So one just sits and does nothing and waits for the meters to "inlast" the building; though that is rife with danger from normal maintenance failures.

Eaton has a little known solution/pathway for these meters.
It is called the Eaton Power Xpert Gateway PXG600.

How does it work:
- Upgrade set of meters to INCOM (sometimes with a PONI/IPONI = INCOM product operated network interface - often these are already in place).
- Run blue cable bus for INCOM between local sets of meters (up to about ten (best) to forty (pushing limits)) in a group. Often "blue hose" is already in place.
- Attach meter group(s) to the INCOM port(s) of PXG600.
- Attach PXG600 to a TCPIP Ethernet network system (attach like any common IP device).
- Setup PXG600(s). The PXG600 has internal template maps for the long history of IQ meters. It supports a variety of protocols like Modbus TCP and in some cases BACnet IP and SNMP.
- Get "middleware" together. One probably has systems that can consume and log meter data (HVAC, SCADA and such). One wants to convert the Modbus TCP data into such,  whilst also leaving openings for others to attach to Modbus TCP in parallel. Something like a Cimetrics B6035 does the intermediation job nicely. But it is also the case that many management systems will read the interfaces directly (especially if you have BACnet/IP in your building management system
or Modbus TCP in your SCADA system).
- Enjoy.

Too hard? Talk to Eaton. Eaton can set this up for you.
Too expensive? The PXG600 is "open channel" and supportable by third parties. Talk to someone like PWA - Physical World Analytics in their troubleshooting capacity or Cimetrics in their network-architecture design capacity. They too can set this up for you.