Leading to powerful indoor automation
The WIRENET project focused on the development of a new system architecture that uses power-line data exchange technology for home and industrial automation. The key innovation relies on the exploitation of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio technology that allows spread of information over a large bandwidth. The basic method employs pulse coded information with a sequence of sharp carrier pulses along the whole frequency spectrum. The project resulted in a number of specialised domestic and commercial applications such as controllers of heating systems, digital audio and video transmission and emergency situations to name a few. One of the key project results involved the design of a low cost/low throughput receiver intended for narrow bandwidth applications for home and small industrial implementation. The robust system allows data exchange over power-line on the basis of a commercial field-programmable gate array (FPGA) semiconductor device. Having been tested the prototype was found to have a long reach without being significantly affected by disturbances. Due to its pulse operation, no oscillators have been included in the system design architecture which substantially reduces both the cost and the size of the device.