The new energy management system allows consumers to monitor and control their home’s energy usage by plugging into an electrical wall outlet. With this new system, consumers can self-track detailed energy records and leverage energy data to project and potentially drive down their future energy costs.
The new platform features 4Home’s ControlPoint software optimized for energy management, which tracks of real-time and historical energy usage for the entire home and individual appliances, projects future energy usage and costs for daily, monthly and yearly cycles based on current energy usage.
It further provides 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.
The plug computer features a 2GHz 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 for application development.
The company said that 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.
Dr Simon Milner, vice president and general manager of enterprise business unit, communications and consumer group at Marvell, said: “Plug computing is gaining rapid adoption in the connected home market for its encapsulated product experience: just plug and go.
“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.”
