ITWissen.info - Tech know how online

Digital stream

The term digital current originated from a project of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). Digitalstrom is intended to improve energy efficiency as an intelligent control system for building electrics and home automation. For example, it can reduce the power of devices in standby mode or switch them on or off via smart metering depending on the electricity tariff.

The digital current concept is a bus system with master- slave operation via which electrical household appliances and building components are controlled in an energy-saving manner. The concept has given rise to the Digitalstrom Alliance, which is attempting to establish Digitalstrom as a worldwide standard.

Digitalstrom as a building bus system

Intelligent, color-coded control units from Digitalstrom

Intelligent, color-coded control units from Digitalstrom

Unlike other building bus systems such as the Konnex bus, Digitalstrom uses small intelligent control units that connect directly to each consumer and control it. The intelligent units are equipped with a chip and are the size of a luster terminal. They are either integrated in the household appliance or built into the socket and optimized for specific functions and applications. The control units are color-coded to distinguish their use for the various appliances found in the home. There are control units for light ( yellow), security ( red), video ( magenta), audio (light blue), access ( green), climate (blue) and shade (gray). For each control unit there are several functions. For example, for the light control unit there are On/Off, Light/Dark and Day/Night functions.

Communication in the digital current concept

Chip for digital current control units dSID, photo: digitalstrom.org

Chip for digital current control units dSID, photo: digitalstrom.org

The control resp. the communication is what distinguishes the digital stream concept. It takes place bidirectionally via the power grid. The transmission method is patented, but has not yet been sufficiently documented. All that is known is that transmission takes place close to the zero crossing of the phase line and that, for this purpose, no supply voltage is available to the consumer device for a short time. There is no high- frequency modulation as with Powerline.

Digitalstrom is a master-slave architecture in which various digitalstrom components communicate with each other. Thus, there is the digital stream server (dSS), the digital stream identification devices (dSID) and the digital stream bus master (dSM). Each component can be assigned its own ID number and addressed via its own Internet address. The components can also communicate with each other. The bus master communicates with the digital current identification devices, which transmit the consumption data to it.

Informations:
Englisch: Digital stream
Updated at: 09.11.2013
#Words: 403
Links: digital, current, project, system, home automation (HA)
Translations: DE
Sharing:    

All rights reserved DATACOM Buchverlag GmbH © 2024