Web Site Design in Toronto

Wireless, Web-based energy monitoring system sensors that are helping manufacturers cut energy costs are making their debut at engineering shows this year, most recently during this week’s Green Manufacturing Expo being held during Design & Manufacturing Midwest in Rosemont, IL.

Agentis Energy’s Acuity Solution monitors energy consumption by tracking kilowatt hours in real time and reporting the information back to the company’s customers via a secure Internet connection. The wireless sensor hooks up to any device that uses electricity, according to Agentis CEO Tim Stojka. “It tracks kilowatt usage and can see spikes in current,” he says. “Its primary use is to understand how energy is being consumed and what the cost is by device. We are an energy-efficient company, helping customers to drive energy costs down.”

Stojka says he believes the Acuity Solution, whose target customer is currently manufacturers, will eventually make its way into every business and every home. “The only way to manage (energy) is to measure it and figure out where it’s going,” he says. “We sell it as a solution. (Customers) buy the hardware and they can access the service.”

According to Agentis Energy’s website, no software needs to be installed with the sensors. Customers are notified of current peak usage of reusable grocery bags, peak costs and potential for savings via e-mail, and the Web portal uses a password access system.

Stojka says he believes that while the idea for the sensors may seem simple enough, no one has really come up with the idea until now because, “more people are (now) sensitized to energy cost.”

“The wireless technology is driving the technology - it is a lot less expensive,” he says, “and the hardware investment is low. Ten years ago, there were similar systems available, they were just a lot more expensive.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Boston, MA — When Microchip started planning for the 2009 Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) held this week in Boston, it was delighted to find out that attendees could pre-register online for its in-booth educational sessions. Microchip’s game plan was to schedule 10 sessions in its booth, which is designed to accommodate a maximum of 20 people per session.

It didn’t quite work out that way, with five to six times more engineers than expected signing up for many of Microchip’s hour-long sessions called “custom bags” on topics ranging from Ethernet Solutions to RF. Some 161 engineers, for example, pre-registered for a session titled USB Solutions, causing Microchip to make a quick decision and move the in-booth sessions to a larger space within the convention center.

“We didn’t really put any cap on the registration, but clearly the online pre-registration was a factor. Another factor is that we are seeing a lot of uptake in USB and related topics,” says Eric Lawson, public relations manager.

Lawson says the Microchip courses offered here were designed to give engineers a taste of a hot topic, and clearly that’s exactly what some of the design engineers here were looking for. With a virtual explosion of technology to stay on top of, engineers are doing their best to learn when and where they can snatch the time. In all, they had a total of 85 sessions to choose from at this year’s ESC to do just that.

Andy Leech, a consultant who designs medical equipment, attended Microchip’s session on Human Interface Solutions. “I’m here getting the flavor of it so that if I have a requirement in the future that is in any way related to the technology, I have a base to build upon,” says Leech. Here on business from the UK, Leech says he pre-registered for a few of the sessions that looked interesting, basically in an attempt to try and keep up with it all. “Engineers are just getting bombarded with information, there’s just this constant need to climb the learning curve,” he says. “At this type of show you get to see all the things you don’t have time to keep up with and maybe learn something about a few of them.”

Paul, another consultant who attended the same session attended Microchip’s session on USB Solutions the day before, and said he was planning to take it again later in the day. “Microchip’s got this 8-bit technology with USB built right in, they’re being extremely aggressive,” he said. “Basically I’m taking the course twice to make sure I understand it.”

Consultant Chuck Lippmeier, an expert in LabVIEW (a graphical programming language from National Instruments) had not taken any of the Microchip courses at this year’s ESC, but says he has in the past. “Every little bit of information that you gather gets you a little closer to where you’re trying to go,” he says. “What I am trying to do now is get on board with microcontrollers, my level is pretty basic at this point,” he says. In the past, he has used training materials on Microchips’s site and attended Microchip’s annual Masters Conference for more intensive training.

In the end, education is part of a never-ending process for design engineers, a task that many regretfully say they now have less time to devote to. So every little bit helps. “It’s kind of like climbing Mount Everest,” says Paul. “One step at a time.”

Click here for more information on Microchip’s technical training and education opportunities.

A new sensor can tell the difference between humans and animals inside a room without the use of expensive infrared (IR) imaging cameras.

Known as the Cool Eye™ Thermopile Array, the device could serve as an energy conservation system, enabling a building’s HVAC to autonomously switch off the heat when there’s no one in a room, or turn up the air conditioning when a room is crowded. It could also inexpensively boost the intelligence of security systems, where its ability to distinguish between humans and animals would enable it to serve in an intruder alarm.

Engineers say the customized bags advantage is its cost. At about $20, the device’s price tag lies close to that of low-end sensors, but with performance reportedly similar to that of $2,000 infrared cameras.

“We’re bridging the gap between dumb sensors and infrared cameras,” says Wolfgang Schmidt, product leader for infrared sensing at PerkinElmer, maker of the Cool Eye. “This is not an IR camera, but its performance is a lot closer to the IR camera than to the simple sensor.”

Cool Eye offers higher performance than the so-called “dumb” sensors because it employs a thermopile detector array containing 16 elements. The array includes lenses, and is available with an EEPROM and a microcontroller with an integrated 10-bit analog-to-digital converter. In contrast, typical IR sensors contain a couple of elements and don’t incorporate focusing optics, Schmidt says.

Schmidt says the new 16-element detector can distinguish between humans and animals because it takes a picture that’s divided into 16 parts, and then it uses the microcontroller to analyze all of the parts.

The device is already being used in an unspecified commercial air conditioning product and in other HVAC applications where it cuts energy consumption.

“This offers more than just an on-off response,” Schmidt says. “It can look at the number of people in a room and help the HVAC system decide if it wants to go into a higher or lower operational mode.”

Without using sub domains or iframes, what is a good way to make 3 instances of a blog software (liek blog engine dot net), functionally look and feel like one single site Web Design Company - all accessible from a single domain?

Ok, so the issue is that i have a blog(blog engine dot net) usign DB provider and there is a ms sql table that holds the posts. I have 50k rows (that’s 50k posts) in this posts table, and the blog app does not scale well and the site cannot load (caching & memory issues). I don’t want to write any code, so I was hoping to find an inventive way that I could break the posts across 3 insances of the blog, bc it runs when there are less than 20k rows in the posts table, and have the 3 instances functionally look like one single instance (site) to the end user.

I think you’d find it a whole lot easier to write a few lines of code and solve the memory issues (which are just sloppy sql query issues) rather than jump through hoops trying to cheat the system. No b/c it is not just simple sql query issues… it is above my head… it is a complex DAL.

Need to somehow add paging, but i have not found any good tutorials on paging in C# and asp.net other than for grids… i could write my own front end using query strings lik “www.whateversgdge.com?q=whatever you know, but I don’t know how to integrate that approach with the URL rewriting that the blog software does.

I agree with sarahk. Fix the code to make it scalable. If it’s over your head, outsource it. Shouldn’t be that expensive to have it resolved once and for all. Just my opinion.

website development india - iQEDSolutions is a global software development and website design outsourcing services company offering professional web design, ecommerce & web application development services.

I am looking for information on exactly what sites with the ability to upload content like video, user profiles, and indexing capabilities are built with… PHP or what?

Basically, I want to build a site that allows users to have a profile and upload a video on their profile, and I want to index content on my site for users to use keywords to search for profiles. I’m not worried about the technical knowledge, I just need to know what these sites are built with.

Also, I want the profiles to have the ability to message other profiles. Not to steal an idea, but I will use myspace as a perfect example. Take this like myspace with a few modifications and an indexing function geared toward a specific target audience. Any help would be appreciated.

You can build a social networking type site in Joomla (php based, I do believe):

http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/getting-started.html
__________________