LS Research launches Rate$aver, a ZigBee Smart Energy Certified In-Home-Display

LS Research launches Rate$aver, a ZigBee Smart Energy Certified In-Home-Display

LS Research has teamed with Ember to develop a ZigBee certified energy monitor – Rate$aver – enabling homeowners and utilities to collaborate on conserving energy and reducing costs.

Based on Ember’s ZigBee technology; helps homeowners cut energy usage and costs

LS Research has teamed with Ember 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.

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.

LS Research with their long-standing experience in wireless communications, wanted to develop the Rate$aver on ZigBee Smart Energy because of ZigBee’s leadership position in the market. LS Research is a leader in the development and deployment of ZigBee-enabled products for the price sensitive consumer market. They partnered with Ember for Ember’s leadership in ZigBee and their reliable and proven ZigBee technology. The decision to add Rate$aver to their 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. 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.

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 on Ember’s Smart Energy Suite, see: http://www.ember.com/products_ember_smart_energy_suite.html