How you can get a perfect fit, custom design product from Brainboxes.

Monitoring energy usage is a growing business, customers want to know exactly how much they are spending on gas, electricity and oil for heating, lighting and manufacturing production. Long gone are the days of leaving the lights burning 24/7 now that power costs real money, burning the lights equals burning the dollars. It is a truism that what can be measured can be managed. Many people are installing meters to help manage their energy usage.

Our customer wanted to use ED-588 to count clicks of a reed switch in a gas meter used in a community heating project. The meter’s reed switch is a volt free contact that is pulsed open/closed according to the temperature corrected volume of gas passing through the meter. The two
sides of the volt free contact are wired to an ED input and the GND terminal. The ED-588 automatically counts transitions on all its inputs. So far so good. The customer’s problem is that he requires the count to be up to 6 decimal figures and it needs to be remembered inside the ED even if it was temporarily unpowered.

Originally our ED products only implemented a 16 bit count that is 0-65535 and there was no non-volatile storage of counts supported. Brainboxes engineers had a conference call with the customer to understand his needs and quickly came up with a solution that has now been implemented across the whole ED range. First, a new 32 bit counting command was devised, documented and thoroughly tested. The 32 bit count allows numbers 0 through 4,294,967,295 achieving 10 decimal digits. Second, the volatile memory chip was upgraded to be non volatile storage having a trillion read/write cycles and retaining data for over 200 years.

So not only does this customer get a product ideally suited to his application, but all future customers of ED-004, ED-008, ED-038, ED-204, ED-516, ED-538 and ED-588 have the benefits counter and persistent storage of counts. Customers who already have these ED products can download the latest firmware and instantly upgrade their 16 bit counter product to have the 32 bit counter functionality.

Over the next few months, we are implementing a planned list of upgrades with the ED product range. We invite you to give us feedback or perhaps other features we have not yet considered.

• Digital I/O Tunnelling
• Modbus support
• Rule based I/O
• Analogue Tunnelling
• Enhanced Network Security for
  ED range
• Easily readable IP address
  using NFC from a smartphone

At Brainboxes we are very keen to work with customers to give them a product that fits them as precisely as a made to measure suit. We are frequently listening to our customers and providing custom solutions to help them achieve their goals. If you require custom programming or hardware, contact our sales team now to discuss your requirements.