Electronics News Future Awards 2012
Each year in Australia Electronics News gives out seven awards for Electronics Design. We are very excited to announce that we received two of these seven awards at the Electronics News Future Awards 2012. We are still waiting on official pictures from the awards ceremony held at the Australian Technology Park during the Electronex Exhibition.
The categories we won were:
- Environment
- Communications and Networking
Electronics News Future Awards 2012
Environment
For the Environment category the award was for the control, sensing and tracking electronics systems on a combined solar PV and hot water system. The core technology from the client was the concentrated solar PV system which converts sunlight to electricity at a much higher efficiency that normal solar panels. Because it tracks the sun during the day it also delivers more power over the course of the day than a fixed installation can. And because it is concentrated sunlight there is a lot of heat. This heat is used to generate hot water via a heat exchanger system. Its a double win for the environment.
The core Electronics Design and Embedded Software we developed covered the following requirements:
- Electrical Power Generation monitoring
- Wireless Telemetry to an In Home Display
- Heat differential measurements across the heat exchanger to 0.1C
- Sun position sensing to within 0.1 degrees
- Gravitic inclination sensing to within 0.1 degrees
- Solar almanac to allow best effort tracking on overcast days
- Solar tracking via a Brushless DC motor controller (BLDC)
- Pump control for the heat exchanger
- Logging of power and heat energy generation
Concentrated Tracking PV + Hot Water
Communications and Networking
This was for converting wired timing gates for athletics to a wireless format using low power RF communications to allow the gates to communicate back to a central hub. This project had a lot of technical challenges. The core Electronics Design challenges were:
- Use of IR through beam detection in full sunlight and without cross talk
- Timing accuracy to 10msecs
- Up to 4 sets of gates in operation in range of each other at the same time
- Long battery life, or low power
- Maintaining future expansion possibilities
This follows on from our wins in 2009 for the Analogue Design and Design Software and in 2011 for Industrial Electronics.
The awards ceremony was followed by a round table discussion on Australian Manufacturing which I will cover separately.
Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. This post is Copyright © 2012 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd
