The Amp Hour

An Interview With Joe Bamberg

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Welcome Joe Bamberg, Lead Hardware Engineer at Sense

  • Joe went to school at Miami, studying for pre-med.
  • After a masters degree in EE, he ended up at Analog Devices (ADI) working on Energy metering ICs.
  • Lyric labs
  • Most meters are electromechanical, using moving parts to measure current via the Right Hand Rule. This then turns a wheel which measures "impulses per kwh"
  • Past guest Larry Sears worked connected (gas!) meters.
  • The first meters that weren't manually read used IR.
  • Different generations of smart meters moved from measuring active power (Watt hour meter) to reactive power (VAR / apparent power / power factor / Line sag)
  • Most homes have a power factor of 1 because of the primarily resistive loads.
  • The onboard "filter based metering" used Hilbert filtering (transforms)
  • Measuring current
    • CT - current transformer
    • Shunt
    • Rogowski coil
    • Joe worked on parts like:
      • ADE7755
      • ADE7858
      • After ADI he ended up at Qualcomm / Pixtronics working on MEMS display technology. It used an IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) process
      • The Sense is primarily in the US and Canada right now, measuring split phase, 120V power.
      • Founder Mike Phillips has lots of experience with speech recognition (and disaggregation), which translated to the signal processing on Sense.
      • Chris asked about if Sense shuts down, Joe later updated that this was addressed on the Sense blog.
      • Internally there is a front end, isolated flyback, iMX7 and WiFi. It runs a custom distro of Linux.
      • It's not just for monitoring power, it also monitors events. For instance, one of Joe's co-workers got a message "Your sump pump is kicking on"
      • The solar version ships another set of CTs
      • Edge processing (computing)
      • There are a bunch of regulations NEC, UL, FCC, CE, CISPR
      • Bolt helped with the initial mechanical design.
      • It's small because of the variable size of installation cavities.
      • Have more questions? Find Joe on Twitter as @thejoebamberg
        • ...more
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        The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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