It has always been the aim of the MAGEEC project to be as open as is practically possible, by making research outputs, software sources and hardware designs all freely available. Of course, hardware still needs to be manufactured and if you don’t have access to facilities for doing this the setup costs associated with third party services can be prohibitive for just one or a few boards.

Back in February we hosted an energy-efficient computing developer room at FOSDEM, and as part of which ran a workshop where participants got hands-on experience using the energy measurement infrastructure. Thanks to generous support from the UK Technology Strategy Board we were also able to give away 50 complete hardware kits at the workshop.

It has become clear that a wider community, who were not able to attend the event, wish to evaluate this technology. We are making a further batch of these boards to support the MAGEEC project and are happy to increase the size of this run in order that kits can be made available to those interested at cost.

Before we get on to how you can register interest in acquiring a kit, first a quick recap of what the energy measurement infrastructure provides.

Board, framework and GUI

The original part of the energy measurement hardware takes the form a “shield” that is used together with an STM32F4-DISCOVERY board to provide the following features:

• 3 independent measurement points, each of which connecting to a target via 3 wires for ground and power intercept.
• Simultaneous measurement of each target at 2,000,000 samples/second.
• Configurable current range, and inductor for use with switch-mode power supplies.
• Statistics such as energy and time, and average power, voltage and current calculated on the STM32F4.
• USB host connection for further processing, data logging and real-time display.

Software support is via a Python module that is installed with simply a single command (pip install --pre pyenergy) and provides scripting and command line interfaces, along with a GUI.

For further details please see James Pallister’s blog post introducing the energy measurement infrastucture, the wiki and the MAGEEC repositories on GitHub.

Evalutation kit contents

The energy measurement hardware kits will comprise of:

• STM32F4-DISCOVERY board
• MAGEEC “WAND” energy measurement shield
• Jumpers for selecting the current range
• 2x USB cables (for programming the DISCOVERY board and host connection)
• A custom acrylic enclosure

Obtaining evaluation kits

If you would like to receive one or more evaluation kits, please send a purchase order for £46 + VAT  per kit to cover the cost of manufacture and delivery, to info@embecosm before 30 September 2014. We are using a low cost manufacturing run and you should expect to receive your kits by the end of November 2014.

Andrew