Category: Uncategorized

Home Automation

Basically Home automation (Domotics) is a way to make things automatic in your home like

  • Controlling of lights
  • Watering to plants
  • Fan controlling
  • HVAC (Heat, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning)

This is growing very rapidly with advent of IoT (Internet of Things) technology. So in the coming years we would also have automation systems at our homes.

Why home automation?   This is very important question. Since Home automation can control anything from your lights and fans to smart power systems like Nest thermostat IoT device.

So, by automation we can save a lot of time doing other important things and we don’t have to think about switching ON/ OFF and controlling the device manually which will also reduce our stress level.

  • Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning
  • Light controlling system
  • Smart meter
  • Security systems
  • Leaks detection, smoke and CO detectors
  • Indoor positioning systems (as used in apple home pods)
  • Home automation for elderly or disabled persons
  • Pet care

Hardware?   Home automation devices are quite compact which you can use in your home very easily. Apart from the required electronics for controlling purposes, these devices have dedicated systems for communication because after all these devices will connect to your smartphone through which you would control anything like light controlling, heating, surveillance etc.

Here is the list of few IoT devices that you could use in your home to make it automated.

Security?   Because these devices are connect with Bluetooth/ Wi-Fi/ Internet connections, so they are prone to security issues which might be harmful for you. But companies have already done a lot of work the security areas so it’s very much difficult to hack these devices for a malicious purposes.

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DMRC’s Automatic Fare Collections Systems (AFCS)

Have you noticed the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) system or Contact less payment system at the Delhi Metro or other Metros? I am talking about the machine which we use to pay the travelling expanses by just placing card on the systems available at DMRC stations. After getting the traveller’s information, AFC opens the gate of through which passenger can pass through.

But do you know how these AFC s work? If not, today we are going to talk about their working.

Basically AFC s consist of devices to read/ write data on card, station computers, back office systems, central clearing house which work in collaboration to make the fare collection process automatic and hassle free.

The cards that we use for fare payment are plastic stripe cards like your ATM or debit card. These cards have one broad black strip on which magnetic particles or material is present. Magnetic particles are used to store data in the form of magnetized particles. So that is how cards hold the information of the user/ passenger.

One of these type of cards were launched in 1997 whose name was ‘Octopus Card’ – Hong Kong which afterwards became the standard for the AFC systems.

Let’s take a brief introduction to the system used in AFC s.

  • Devices to read/ write media-These consists of ticket vending machines and fare gate (on which you place your card)
  • Station computers – It’s used to provide the data communications between the devices within the stations.
  • Back office – It’s the place where all the management of AFC system occurs.
  • Clearing house (Central Management System) – It takes cores of all the financial management required to collect the fare, clearing the old balances etc.

So, this was the brief summary how Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) works.In the coming years, we will see the use of these systems commonly everywhere even in our buses.

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Nano Sensors

Nano sensors are extremely small level integrated sensors which are used to detect changes in physical parameters like temperature, pressure etc. on very small scale.

Nano sensors contain materials which are called nanomaterials and which do all the magic at nano scale level or nano particle level. Some of the examples of nanomaterials are Fullerence, Carbon nanotubes (used in manufacturing of small electronic components like transistors).

These sensors are the future of sensors that we are using currently in our daily life. Conventional sensors are quite big and less efficient in comparison with the nano sensors.

Because of their extremely small size nano sensors can directly interact with molecules and detect the changes occurs in them.

Let’s talk a little about fabrication of transistors which is fundamental component of all the I.C. (Integrated Circuits). We have seen the size of transistor changing form few inches (Triode) to 10 nm (Used in latest processors like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, Samsung’s Exynos 8895 and many more) since the transistor first invented in 1948 at Bell Laboratories.

There is a law regarding the size of transistor that could be possible to reduce after every 2 years and this is called Moore’s law. Moore’s law states that “Number of transistor in a dense Integrated Circuit doubles approximately every two years”.

Carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNFET) refers to a transistor that uses a carbon nanotube/s to transfer the electron from source/emitter to drain/collector of the transistor where this tube works as a channel inspite of using bulk Silicon/ Germanium. First component of this type was first demonstrated in 1998.

Samsung, TSMC, Intel and other big manufacturers of chips are working on the 7nm fabrication technology which will see in few days.

Applications of Nano Sensors

  • Biomedical Science (to detect the beginning of dangerous diseases like Cancer)
  • Extremely small size embedded systems
  • Space exploration
  • Research labs. Etc.

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Intel Atom

It’s a brand name for a line of Ultra low voltage IA32 (“Short for Intel Architecture, 32 bit”, some times also called i386 is a 32 bit version of x86 instruction set architecture) and x86-64 (64-bit instruction set architecture) micro processors by Intel corporation. Mainly used in netbooks, embedded applications from healthcare to advanced robotics and mobile internet devices (MIDs). Originally designed in 45 nm CMOS technology.

It’s 1st generation processors were based on the “Bonnel” micro-architecture.

In 2012, Intel launched the 64 bit Centerton family of Atom CPUs designed specifically for servers.

In 2013, Intel launched 22 nm successor to Centerton, code named Avoton.

Intel Atom is direct successor of the Intel A10 and A110 low power microprocessors (Codenamed Stealey) 90 nm process.

Atom processors became available to system manufacturers in 2008. The Diamondville and Pineview Atom is used microprocessor mini series, Asus N10, Lenovo Idea Pad S10, Acer Aspire One, Sony VAIO M-series, Dell Inspiron mini series, Samsung NC10.

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Samsung Exynos Series 5 SoC (7872)

Samsung has launched the Exynos 5 series 7872 SoC recently. This SoC is not as good as Series 9 9810, which is designed for high end smartphones. It has been designed for the medium level smartphones which would be in budget of most of the people.

Fabrication: It’s based on 14 nm FinFET fabrication process which gives it high density and low power consumption as compared to previously launched SoC in its series.

CPU: Exynos 7872 has Hexacore CPU consisting two Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2 GHz and four Cortex A53 clocked at 1.6 GHz to provide it a balance between performance and power saving mode.

GPU: It has the ARM’s Mali G-72 which is not the latest but would provide a descent performance in mid range smartphones.

Modem: Exynos 7872 comes with LTE Cat 7 modem which is capable of 300 Mbps download speed and 150 Mbps upload speed.

Camera: Exynos 7872 can support 21.7 MP front as well as rear side cameras which is good for the mobiles in the mid range budget.

Video: It can record upto 1920x 1200 pixels at 120 fps (Frames Per Second) full HD video.

Bluetooth: It comes with Bluetooth 5.0 which is the latest Bluetooth version in smartphones.

Security: It is capable of handling high end security features like iris scanner.

Overall, It is a good quality SoC from Samsung for the mid range smartphones which you would see in the series of phones by the companies like Meizu, Lenovo etc.

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