The Brief
A novel power monitoring device needed upgrading to allow it to support both Cisco proprietary and industry standard building services integration protocols. This required the architecting and development of a suitable PoE – powered hardware and embedded software solution to network enable this technology.
In addition the analogue nature of the installation process required a secure user friendly setup and configuration interface that could be used to service both the on-site commissioning function and the interaction with a number of different high level building services management solutions.
As a volume product additional software functions needed to be included to support a streamlined manufacturing process.
The Solution
Fen worked with the client’s team to define a suitable comm’s protocol and physical interface to the power monitoring unit, which enabled its connection to the building management system.
Considerable effort was made to select a low cost processor & memory solution. Significant optimisation of the embedded software was required to accommodate both the Fen proprietary code and the third party stack on this limited platform.
For ease of integration into multiple environments Fen chose to implement a secure embedded web server accessed through a Fen defined REST API.
Fen designed a PoE adapter unit to allow powering and installation to be done locally by a maintenance engineer’s laptop prior to connection to the network.
