4Home, Marvell partner for energy monitoring plug computer

If you asked Intel what this is, the company would tell you it's an experimental power sensor; if you asked a storage guru, they'd ID it as the PogoPlug. Truth be told, it's a miniature Linux computer designed by Marvell -- who's apparently decided to beat Intel at the former function. Through a partnership with 4Home, Marvell's latest 2GHz SheevaPlug will become a smart meter that measures power consumption right from the outlet, ostensibly allowing you to figure out which blasted light the kids left on this time without shoving a pricey home automation kit into your walls. No word on how much it'll cost to keep tabs on your energy bill or when you'll be able to do it, but we'll ask those important questions and more when we see the device for ourselves later this week. PR after the break.

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4Home and Marvell Introduce Jointly-Developed Plug Computer for Energy Management
New Plug Computer Featuring Plug 'n' Play Energy Management to be Showcased at CONNECTIONS Conference

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., June 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL), a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, and 4Home, a leading provider of connected home services software, today introduced a new energy management solution, based on the SheevaPlug™, powered by Marvell® Sheeva™ CPU technology. The new energy management solution allows consumers to easily and reliably monitor and control their home's energy usage by simply plugging into an electrical wall outlet. With this new solution, consumers will have the freedom to self-track detailed energy records and leverage energy data to project and potentially drive down their future energy costs. Furthermore, with embedded features from the SheevaPlug, consumers can enjoy environmentally-friendly, always-on energy monitoring with zero-configuration.

"Plug Computing is gaining rapid adoption in the connected home market for its encapsulated product experience: just plug and go," said Dr. Simon Milner, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Business Unit, Communications and Consumer Group at Marvell. "The Plug Computer for energy management enables an entire ecosystem of green products to work together seamlessly, behind the scenes to allow consumers to manage their energy usage from their television, smartphone, or tablet."

About the 4Home ControlPoint™ Software

The new platform features 4Home's ControlPoint™ software optimized for energy management, which includes the following features:

* Tracking of real-time and historical energy usage for the entire home as well as individual appliances
* Projection of future energy usage and costs for daily, monthly and yearly cycles based on current energy usage
* Alerts notifying users if they are trending towards an overage in energy usage based on the amount of energy use that they allocate for the given time period


"Energy management is a leading connected home service that's driving the development of home systems that can support new connectivity standards and protocols to enable the monitoring and control of residential energy use," said Nate Williams, CMO at 4Home. "The plug-computing platform introduces an unobtrusive and fully-connected energy management system into the home environment, and benefits from the underlying ControlPoint software that allows it to be compatible with new devices, standards, and home configurations."

About the Plug Computer

The award-winning Plug Computer is designed to make high-performance, always on, always connected, and green computing readily available for developers and end-users. Plug Computers feature a 2 GHz Marvell ARMADA™ 300 processor, and optional built-in hard-disk drive and embedded Marvell Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies. Additional peripherals such as Direct Attached Storage (DAS) can be connected using a USB 2.0 port. Multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions are supported on the Plug Computer development platform enabling rapid application development. The enclosure is designed to plug directly into a standard wall socket and is designed to draw less than one tenth of the power of a typical PC being used as a home server.

"With smart meters rolling out aggressively and driving concerns about both rising energy costs and conservation, there is a dramatic increase in interest for home energy management systems," said Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. "The Plug Computing platform coupled with the 4Home ControlPoint software creates a compelling and cost-effective solution for the home owner looking to both conserve and better manage their home energy use."

[buoy Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:24PM]

Does it come in beige? My wall outlets were made in the 1930s... I need beige.

[BigGunn Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:30PM]

Is it just me, or is that a very poorly worded title for an article?

[buoy Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:32PM]

@BigGunn its kinda wierd seeing the word 'partner' used as a verb. But yeah looks disjointed lol.

[annoynimous Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:33PM]

@BigGunn I second that, please give me a job at Engadget, I'll do better LOL

[endgadget Posted Jun 9th 2010 5:43AM]

@annoynimous
Dude, you might have to learn to do worse

[psc2 Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:56PM]

Sweet... now I dont need to plug stuff into my UPS to see how much power it draws!!

[markolic Posted Jun 8th 2010 11:59PM]

What time was little Jimmy on his laptop watching porn?

[guroth Posted Jun 9th 2010 12:50AM]

@markolic

If Jimmy was on his laptop then it wouldn't be using any outlet power, would it?

[airbag888 Posted Jun 9th 2010 12:24AM]

That's kind of good and bad.. my current sheeva plug(tonido) is connected to my UPS so it never shuts down to a power failure.
Getting this one implies it'll have to be in the mains directly.
But darn it the bump in specs opens things up quite a bit!

[The Dead Marxist Trio Posted Jun 9th 2010 1:05AM]

This sounds awesomely useful, but I want to see real world energy usage of this thing before I consider it.

[urza9814 Posted Jun 9th 2010 1:37AM]

If you asked me what that thing was, I'd ID it as that box I have upstairs running FCON 24/7. Great little device. Could use more storage though. They should throw in a laptop hard drive next time :)

[mrqs Posted Jun 9th 2010 3:04AM]

was mine the only mind to conjure up a toaster when first glancing at that picture?

[wooptoo Posted Jun 9th 2010 4:25AM]

Too bad it has huge overheating issues. I wanted to order a GuruPlug (which is essentially the same, but has two NICs) and found a lot of complaints on their forums.

[Zhuzhu Posted Jun 9th 2010 9:41AM]

This is BS, intended for the same kneejerk idiots who will buy anything labeled "green". You can't measure the power consumption of an entire house from one outlet—the measuring device needs to be in series with the entire load (as real electric meters are).

The only way this could produce any results would be to measure voltage drops at the outlet where it's plugged in, but those can be caused by sources outside your home.

Think I'm wrong? Google "how does a smart meter work"—there are NO results for this type of gadget, only for the real ones built into the house's electric meter.

Zhuzhu, electrical engineer (retired)

[akaTRENT Posted Jun 9th 2010 10:46AM]

can you say.... POGOPLUG?

[jggllnt Posted Jun 13th 2010 1:24PM]

@Zhuzhu

You are right. You can't measure the entire power consumption of the home, let alone all the appliances, by just plugging a device right into the wall. I know intel demoed a device that was able to do something that resembled this, but as an electrical engineer who works in the home energy management area specifically, I am extremely skeptical that this could work outside of their highly controlled demo.

My feeling is that this device must connect wirelessly to the customer's smart meter to retrieve power usage information. Of course, I could be wrong and this device could be made of fairy dust and unicorn tears after all.