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WebBrick6
If you attended the recent London Smarthome show you may well have seen an unusually powerful WebBrick on the stand.
Well that WebBrick (was) in the final stages of preparation, so we thought we'd let you know what it looks like and what we've been up to. |
WebBrick 6 - Bring it on!
Call it a Leviathon, Nemesis or Elephant project, but any way we measure it, the WebBrick 6 is our biggest development project to date.
We're through the slog work and onto the final tasks before release, so we're sitting here with a decent cup of tea putting together an article about the journey so far.
If you're sitting comfortably, here what the WebBrick 6 or WB10B60 looks like: 
And here's a view of the internals of prototype three which is sitting on a test bench. Note that we've found a smart new heatsink! 
Right now three of them are in 'dogfooding' which means we have them permanently connected to our own homes so that we live with the consequences of any failure. We're please to report we're having good time with them and there's a minor fight going on for the test units!
Along the way
The key movement from the venerable WebBrick 5 Series was to build the 6 as an installers automation Appliance.
This meant a change away from the Molex style connectors to the Phoenix style rising clamp connectors. (If you're an OEM customer, please don't worry because the WebBrick board uses dual 40 IDC Headers). We reckon we can hear the installer breathing sighs of relief from here!
We also wanted to increase the number of IO connections and roll up some of the firmware improvements we've made in the 5 series, specifically:
5 Temperature Sensors with 0.1 Deg C Resolution
4 Analogue Inputs
4 Analogue Outputs
The 6 Series is built as an IO board and a WebBrick board. The IO board has been key to building direct interfaces with the outside world, namely:
4 Mains outputs, zero volt switching 4A capacity (6.3A all channels driven)
2 Changeover Relays - very useful for curtain motors
4 Open Collector outputs
New Software Features
We've put so much effort in to the WebBrick 6 release, all of it based on customer feedback, the most important new features are:
Schedules - WebBrick 6 can now run its own schedules, so it can be left to get on with daily tasks ad infinitum.
Scenes - one input event can now set the output state and level of every single digital and analogue output.
Actions - there's new actions like set Scene, Next and Previous
Thresholds - we had a two sets on WebBrick 5, now they are available on every temperature sensor and analogue input.
Password - we added configuration security to the WebBrick - you have to login before configuration can take place.
Quick tour of Schedules
To configure schedules, we first need to login, here's the new login page: 
We can still view the schedules without login active, however once logged in we can view schedules: 
From here we can configure individual schedule events: 
Scenes
In Scenes, you can set the state or level of any output, or Ignore it. This is very useful for setting partial scenes for controlling a group of outputs according to external stimulae.
General Scenes view: 
Here's a view of scene configuration: 
New Actions
Before we get to the new actions, we need to have a quick look at output channels, this is because these now include Scenes: 
Now we can apply the following actions: 
Testing
We took the final prototypes up to DB Technologies in Cambridge for EMI emissions and immunity testing. Basically they use very sensitive aerials in an anechoic chamber to check that the WebBrick 6 does not have any harmful emissions. We were looking for emission below 2 nanowatts of power!
The immunity testing consisted of subjecting the WebBrick to a high power radio frequency sweep whilst operating the digital triggers continously.
Here's Richard and James the test engineer considering some traces: 
Here's what it looks like wehn the WebBrick is being tested with high field strength radio waves: 
Dog Fooding
This is the practice of consuming your own product before the customer does. We thought we'd show you a few pictures of an older WebBrick 5.0 board fitted with a current PIC 18F4525 chip runing the WebBrick 6 series firmware.
This WebBrick is connected to a range of indoor and external LED lighting fittings that run at Twilight, or when there is a power outage. The other key connections are to monitor a Galaxy 18 intruder alarm panel and a standard SensorTec fire alarm. You'll note that we're using the dry contact here in order to comply with Nacoss regulations. This means that the intruder and fire alarms run independently from the WebBrick. In this case WebBrick provides the monitoring, and via some HGA functions gives a SMS message service through TextAnywhere
Anyway, here's the pictures, starting with a general view of the previous system: 
The old system was built in a 19 inch rack panel and was getting a bit unwieldy to handle all the inconnection. Now we've got a better handle of the requirements we split the functions into two wall mounted boxes. Here's an overview of the two new boxes mid installation: 
and Next ....
We've built 25 Version 6 WebBricks, 2 are in dog food, 2 were used for CE Testing and Andy ran off with one for the archive (it will become the public WebBrick shortly). All the rest are already sold, this has given us the confidence to go for a much larger batch run. Call John at o2m8 if you'd like to order some! |