Analysis of Industry Standards Protocol

Introduction

Industry Standards refers to products that are being produced by the mainstream economy. Open Source Ecology takes industry standards as the starting point converting these norms to ones that are based on Open Source Ecology. Once these industry standards are understood, they can be modified to fit the needs of open source, appropriate technology.

The best starting point for building any device or machine is to study what has been done already: history, prior art (patents), and industry standards.

It is an assumption of OSE that here are no inventions, but only small incremental developments on a large, existing pool of knowledge. These are known as innovations.

In order to create an innovative design, it is critical to have a deep understanding of the designs and mechanisms that are in common use - such as in products that are available on the open market. The critical enabler of open innovation is access to documentation of what has already been done.

A study of Industry Standards includes:

1. History - what has been done already? What is the first ever working example of the artifact? How has this evolved in time and geography?
2. Prior Art - patents may be used as an official record of innovations' descriptions
3. Study of Industry Standards - What kind of features and performances are common in commercially-available, mainstream products? These may not necessarily be desirable, but it is important to understand why they exist.

1. Comprehensive listing of mechanisms or designs that are in common use today, as well as listing of lesser known designs
2. Explanation of the key features of each design
3. Analysis of performance to cost ratio for each machine or component. This should be expressed as cost per unit of performance, such as: cost per kW of power generated, cost per throughput of production, etc.

The analysis of history and industry standards is a good starting point for a Modules Breakdown Diagram, and for extracting working mechanisms for a Tech Tree of Choices.

Protocol

1. Use Study of Industry Standards Template - make a copy of it for your use.
2. Research the machine or module on the internet.
3. Publish on the wiki and link in your Work Log.

IOT Protocols

The protocols for use with the IOT will probably follow industry standards, since currently available protocols are sufficient for our needs and are readily available at very low cost.

=802.11

Communication between the IOT will probably use IEEE 802.11: [1]

This is already used with the IOT, but the current implementation is not very robust, due to the limited WIFI ability of the HUZZAH ESP8266.

Controller Protocol

TTL

Transistor to Transistor Logic (TTL) is based on digital voltage levels: [2]

The proposed controller uses direct connections with digital voltage levels to control the relays. This is a limited protocol, since it requires one pin for each line controlled. For example: A 4 relay board requires 4 digital pins from the arduino. The state of each pin (high / low) determines the state of the relay (on / off). Several TTL lines can be multiplexed to expand the number of control lines into addresses - this requires additional hardware.

PWM

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) uses digital pulses of varying widths to transmit information: [3]

PWM used by the digital input lines of the arduino and is currently used in the IOT to communicate with the DHT22 temperature & humidity sensors and the remote power switch transmitter. PWM is commonly used by arduino compatible devices.

Sensor Protocols

The sensors use two protocols:

I2C

I2C is a two wire bus protocol detailed as follows: [4]

This is already useful for the IOT, since three of the sensors use I2C and it is commonly used in arduino compatible devices. Also, it only requires 2 pins to support hundreds of devices. Often, I2C device addresses are configurable. When they cannot, workarounds are possible, but require additional hardware.

PWM

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) uses digital pulses of varying widths to transmit information and is documented above.

TTL

Transistor to Transistor Logic (TTL) is based on digital voltage levels in electronics and is documented above.

SPI

The Serial Peripheral Interface Bus (SPI) is a 4 wire bus protocol: [5] While SPI is supported by the arduino, it is not very common in arduino devices or in available arduino software.