LS Research, a leading product development company specializing in RF design has teamed with Ember, a leader in ZigBee® technology, to develop a ZigBee certified energy monitor – Rate$aver™ – enabling homeowners and utilities to collaborate on conserving energy and reducing costs.
LS Research’s Rate$aver is a ZigBee Smart Energy-certified and FCC/IC-approved in-home-display (IHD) energy usage rate monitor based on Ember’s ZigBee technology. The device serves as a wireless communications portal between utility companies and their customers. It provides reliable, wireless communication of consumption data from the utility meter into the home. With it, homeowners can now make more informed decisions about their energy usage, promoting energy conservation and helping electric utilities to reduce peak load demand.
Rate$aver is the first battery-powered, wireless graphical display employing the ZigBee Smart Energy public application profile, which supports pricing, security, simple metering and messaging clusters, and is interoperable with other ZigBee Smart Energy certified products including electric smart meters. Rate$aver runs for up to two years on two AA batteries and uses a unique display technology that allows the display to remain visible even after the radio and the power are turned off.
“The Rate$aver plays an important role in helping consumers manage energy use,” said Benno Ritter, vice president of marketing for the ZigBee Alliance. “ZigBee Smart Energy makes connecting in-home displays to a ZigBee home area network easy and affordable. We congratulate LS Research on successfully completing our rigorous ZigBee Smart Energy product certification process.”
LS Research was able to take advantage of Ember’s Smart Energy Suite (SES) to bring the Rate$aver to market quickly. Ember’s Smart Energy Suite provides a fully integrated hardware and software platform including:
- the EM250 ZigBee System-on-Chip (SoC),
- EmberZNet PRO networking software,
- Smart Energy Certified application profile
- Ember AppBuilder – a development tool for ZigBee Smart Energy, and
- Certicom elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) security software for ZigBee Smart Energy
The Rate$aver provides an advanced radio architecture and a 100mW power amplifier that eliminates the need for repeater devices in most homes. Rate$aver also employs Ember’s bootloader capability enabling easy implementation of software updates.
“With our long-standing experience in wireless communications, we wanted to develop the Rate$aver on ZigBee Smart Energy because of ZigBee’s leadership position in the market,” said Peter Mayhew, director of western sales for LS Research. “LS Research is a leader in the development and deployment of ZigBee-enabled products for the price sensitive consumer market. We partnered with Ember for their leadership in ZigBee and their reliable and proven ZigBee technology. The decision to add Rate$aver to our existing portfolio of products and services was driven by customer demand for ZigBee Smart Energy-based IHDs.”
Ember’s EM250, the industry’s first ZigBee SoC integrates an IEEE 802.15.4 radio, a 16-bit microprocessor, flash, RAM and peripherals delivering excellent performance. Using the EM250 SoC, users can create functionally rich, high performance ZigBee applications without the need for other resources. The EM250 SoC along with the EmberZNet PRO networking stack is a ZigBee “Golden Unit” platform and is the industry’s only true SoC platform, supporting the ZigBee PRO Feature Set.
“Ember is committed to providing solutions that enable lower costs, design simplicity and rapid time to market,” said Dennis Natale, Ember vice president of sales. “Rate$aver, with its simplicity and ease of use, is ideal for all consumers to manage energy in their homes more efficiently and also to communicate with utilities for energy pricing.”
Rate$aver will be on display in the Ember booth – ZigBee pavilion # 21719 – at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2009) in Las Vegas, Jan 8-11. Product and pricing information are available by contacting LS Research (http://www.lsr.com).
About ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
ZigBee is the global wireless language connecting dramatically different devices to work together and enhance everyday life. The ZigBee Alliance is a non-profit association of more than 300 member companies driving development of ZigBee wireless technology. The Alliance promotes world-wide adoption of ZigBee as the leading wirelessly networked, sensing and control standard for use in energy, home, commercial and industrial areas.
For more information, visit: www.ZigBee.org.
About LS Research, LLC: From Product Concept to Production
LS Research is the premier wireless product development company specializing in RF design, software development, CAD, prototype development, and FCC/IC/CE certification services. LS Research has also developed a line of RF FCC/IC Certified modules to help customers get to market faster with little to no engineering cost. LS Research is at the forefront of the latest wireless technologies, including LPW, ZigBee, Wireless USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, MURS, and UWB. We design wireless products to help our clients take their business to the next level through technical innovation. LS Research has a long history of helping both Fortune 500 companies and startups with new product development.
At the heart of LS Research’s innovative talent is the core RF engineering group with more than 28 years of proven wireless product development experience. In addition, LS Research is the only product development firm with turn-key design service and an on-site FCC/IC/CE accredited test facility for all your EMC testing needs. For more information, visit www.lsr.com.
About Ember Corporation
Ember Corporation develops ZigBee wireless networking technology that enables companies involved in energy technologies – enertech – to help make buildings and homes smarter, consume less energy, operate more efficiently, and keep people comfortable and safe. Ember’s low-power wireless technology can be embedded into a wide variety of devices to be part of a self-organizing mesh network. Ember is headquartered in Boston and has its radio development center in Cambridge, England, and distributors worldwide. The company is a promoter and Board member of the ZigBee Alliance and its platform is the “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more information, please visit http://www.ember.com.
