WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:12.920 Hello everyone, it's nice to be here again from last year. 00:12.920 --> 00:13.920 We are on tech. 00:13.920 --> 00:17.320 We're going to present our work in the update we had since last year. 00:17.320 --> 00:21.760 Just to show our hands how many of you have heard of us or seen our work. 00:21.760 --> 00:22.760 Not that many people. 00:22.760 --> 00:23.760 It's just wonderful. 00:23.760 --> 00:28.160 So we're going to introduce ourselves to new people. 00:28.160 --> 00:29.960 My name is Louis. 00:29.960 --> 00:35.280 On tech is our objective is to democratize access to power electronics, which is the fundamental 00:35.280 --> 00:37.720 building blocks of the energy grid. 00:37.720 --> 00:43.640 And I am the co-founder with John of the on tech foundation and the on tech startup. 00:43.640 --> 00:45.960 So I am the president of the foundation. 00:45.960 --> 00:50.640 And I'm leading the startup business counterpart. 00:50.640 --> 00:53.600 And of course, somebody has got to do the hard work. 00:53.600 --> 00:58.600 We have Clima, who's in the back of the room, who's without his great work. 00:58.600 --> 01:03.200 We will not be able to have the software up and running. 01:03.200 --> 01:06.360 How many of you have heard of power electronics? 01:06.360 --> 01:08.360 Just show hands of most of you. 01:08.360 --> 01:09.360 Wonderful. 01:09.360 --> 01:13.360 So they are the building blocks of all the grid. 01:13.360 --> 01:20.040 In electric vehicles, we find inverters, we find non-bore chargers, the electric vehicle market 01:20.040 --> 01:21.040 is growing. 01:21.080 --> 01:24.000 There's fierce competition in there. 01:24.000 --> 01:26.840 There's also a small mobility in our e-bikes. 01:26.840 --> 01:31.920 We see again increasing the man for this sort of intermediary power vehicles. 01:31.920 --> 01:33.680 It's the same power electronics architecture. 01:33.680 --> 01:36.960 We talk about inverters again, speed controllers. 01:36.960 --> 01:40.880 We get the on-board charging. 01:40.880 --> 01:42.160 We get into PV inverters. 01:42.160 --> 01:50.040 Well, we have string inverters at this scale of big PV plants or even household plants. 01:50.080 --> 01:57.040 So we also have micro inverters for ACPV to... 01:57.040 --> 02:00.520 So for balcony grid, at lower voltages. 02:00.520 --> 02:01.880 We also have grid connections. 02:01.880 --> 02:07.160 We find MMCs, which are big power converters for connecting different parts of the grid. 02:07.160 --> 02:12.040 We also have SSDs, which are solid state transformers, where we leverage power electronics 02:12.040 --> 02:17.640 to build transformers, which are smaller, smaller footprint. 02:17.640 --> 02:19.520 And we also talk about storage. 02:19.520 --> 02:25.120 We can see in batteries or H2 bidirection inverters, charging these batteries. 02:25.120 --> 02:31.640 And these batteries cost about 30 cents for what hour, with having a great impact on 02:31.640 --> 02:34.480 how the grid works today. 02:34.480 --> 02:37.200 So all this creates a complexity barrier. 02:37.200 --> 02:40.360 That means that electronics are everywhere. 02:40.360 --> 02:45.960 We need to manufacture these electronics, we need to maintain these electronics. 02:45.960 --> 02:50.280 And it means that we need to go faster in our AD. 02:50.280 --> 02:53.440 And there is this scarcity of actually people who can do this work. 02:53.440 --> 02:58.640 There's less and less people who actually know how to get inside this complexity barrier. 02:58.640 --> 03:01.360 And we believe that people learn by doing. 03:01.360 --> 03:03.720 They have to solve problems which they care for. 03:03.720 --> 03:06.240 They want to provide less trustee, you know, for their neighbors. 03:06.240 --> 03:10.000 They want to have a sustainable community next door. 03:10.000 --> 03:14.920 They want to have access to clean and renewable and cheap energy to themselves and to the 03:14.960 --> 03:17.400 people around them. 03:17.400 --> 03:22.640 So what we are trying to do at Don't Tech is we're trying to do in the power sector, in 03:22.640 --> 03:28.240 the power electronics, what Arduino and Raspberry Pi did in the industry from ethics and 03:28.240 --> 03:29.640 the informatics sector. 03:29.640 --> 03:35.880 We introduce hardware that is easy to use, reprogrammable, and then can be leveraged to create 03:35.880 --> 03:38.080 a sort of a power computer. 03:38.680 --> 03:45.520 I'm taking over on that and so how can you do that? 03:45.520 --> 03:49.280 How can you do the Arduino of or is the Raspberry Pi of electronics? 03:49.280 --> 03:53.880 It's quite hard because it's usually application specific, right? 03:53.880 --> 03:58.200 You have like this black box that depends on the application you are targeting. 03:58.200 --> 04:03.640 And in the end it boils down to having a small brain that does the fast calculation and 04:03.680 --> 04:10.120 does the math that is involved into controlling the power flow and muscles that will 04:10.120 --> 04:18.200 act on the power flow and realize your target application and make it a reality. 04:18.200 --> 04:25.640 So in our case what we've done is we've divided the brain and the muscles so that you can 04:25.640 --> 04:31.400 use Ivers' brain itself and use your own muscles if you are a power electronics engineer 04:31.400 --> 04:37.760 and you have like your own converter, you can embed an open source firmware that contains 04:37.760 --> 04:41.920 all the APIs that you need to know to control the power flow and this is what the spin 04:41.920 --> 04:46.320 board is about, it's a small tiny board that you can embed on your own topology 04:46.320 --> 04:52.240 on your own power converter and control your power flow with open, open firmware. 04:52.240 --> 04:57.600 And so it aims at targeting a wide audience, right, so control engineers are not really 04:57.600 --> 05:04.640 familiar with the embedded microcontroller huge manuals and pages, they want to just focus 05:04.640 --> 05:11.840 on math lab stuff and so we provide a convenience, he's grease, a graphical interface and 05:11.840 --> 05:15.680 math lab plugins, you know, to comply with the different ergonomics of the different 05:15.680 --> 05:24.200 crowd that is involved into making power electronics, sorry, and then we have like the muscles 05:24.280 --> 05:30.720 and so for that what we do is we leverage what we call power shields which are addons that 05:30.720 --> 05:37.280 do a specific function according to the need of the user and so what we've done is we've 05:37.280 --> 05:41.840 done power shields that are modular and that can communicate among different modules 05:41.840 --> 05:48.240 and so that you can reach your power level depending on how many power modules you will 05:48.240 --> 05:57.720 power in and so this is how it works. So what we've done in V1 in V1 we came up with a 05:57.720 --> 06:03.440 comprehensive firmware that has plenty of features related to power electronics, right, so it 06:03.440 --> 06:08.200 must be an odd real-time compatible, so if you are not able to control your power flow and 06:08.200 --> 06:13.240 you skip one control step everything will crash, so you need to ensure that your control 06:13.240 --> 06:17.920 flow will be applied at every time step and then you have like plenty of functions that 06:17.920 --> 06:22.800 depends on that specific domain of power electronics. So what we've built is something that 06:22.800 --> 06:28.400 is comprehensive enough so that you can go from the silicon to the power transistors, to 06:28.400 --> 06:35.280 the power topology and control it with this open firmware. So under the hood there is 06:35.280 --> 06:42.680 a Zeferatos which is one of the big projects of the Linux Foundation which does the 06:42.680 --> 06:48.560 big job of being future proof and having like all nice, eye-level drivers and so on and 06:48.560 --> 06:53.320 what we've built is some custom made drivers to target the specific application of 06:53.320 --> 07:01.640 power electronics. So what is now upstream in in the last release candidate are actually 07:01.640 --> 07:06.280 we were supposed to really there is a version today but we'll be late if we have a few 07:06.280 --> 07:13.560 comments away. Anyway what we've done is we've made it quite simple, usually in embedded world 07:13.560 --> 07:18.440 it's always really odd, you have like this well known sentence. Yeah well first you have 07:18.440 --> 07:23.280 to install the tool chain and then install the dependencies and run a weird script and 07:23.280 --> 07:29.480 eventually we compile the source and it may blink, right? So what we are trying to do is 07:29.480 --> 07:33.640 doing it done simple for people that are not IT specialists because they are application 07:33.640 --> 07:38.760 specialists are related to I don't know. Automotive or greed or whatever but they are 07:38.760 --> 07:44.360 not expecting embedded world, right? So we have like diminished the complexity barrier for 07:44.360 --> 07:50.600 that and so we have like Loki examples that just you press a button and you download all 07:50.600 --> 07:56.560 the dependency by itself it will compile and you will be able to try it in a minute. 07:56.560 --> 08:02.000 And so we came up this year with a new documentation center that explains everything with 08:02.000 --> 08:08.520 human-made documentation which is not only doxygen or auto-generated so that you can have 08:08.520 --> 08:17.000 like anti-commence and insightful examples in order to do some real-life power applications. 08:17.000 --> 08:22.600 And also we've merged a really nice feature is that like now you don't need a fancy oscilloscope 08:22.680 --> 08:28.200 in order to debug your application you can just take the board itself using embedded sensors 08:28.200 --> 08:33.960 and retrieve this live data that is pulled by the board itself really fast and so you get 08:33.960 --> 08:39.400 like this kind of nice waveforms where you can see your grid slowly forming in this case it's 08:39.400 --> 08:47.080 a motor application. So I was saying we split it the brain and the muscles and you know we 08:47.160 --> 08:53.000 are at first them so we cannot do a presentation without having a code slide. So here is how 08:53.000 --> 08:59.160 you have like a manifest that describe your hardware and then from that if you are the power guy 08:59.160 --> 09:03.880 you just have to describe which sensors on the board which are the power transistors that will 09:03.880 --> 09:11.720 render the topology and from there you can use the generic firmware that we've built to control 09:11.720 --> 09:16.120 your application. So you are not necessarily tied to the power shield that we've developed 09:16.200 --> 09:21.560 anyone can join with their specificity and their specific application and from there we cannot 09:21.560 --> 09:29.400 create this power book of different power shields. So yeah the stable version is about to come 09:29.400 --> 09:37.400 because I think I will throw away. And like I will go really fast because we are falling short of time 09:37.400 --> 09:43.960 and we have like a small video showing a demo. But the other word we're going to be is basically 09:43.960 --> 09:51.160 creating partial that are more and more powerful and also having like a new module that will 09:51.160 --> 09:58.280 create and permits new applications and we also have like new things where we are able now to 09:58.280 --> 10:04.040 parallel these modules as I was explaining before it's not only a schematic it's a reality and we are 10:04.040 --> 10:09.800 working out really hard not not to be able only to parallel the modules but also to place them 10:09.880 --> 10:18.600 in series to do kind of MNCs or advanced applications that could be really interesting for the future. 10:21.560 --> 10:25.960 Lastly and what's coming next regarding the software because I think it's really important to 10:25.960 --> 10:32.360 showcase what's the roadmap of the project. So now we are at the V1 step right we have multiple 10:32.360 --> 10:38.920 improvements that will be done in this year which are related to the scheduling and the 10:38.920 --> 10:44.600 hard real time part that is specific to par electronics but also we want to embed some other 10:44.600 --> 10:51.400 unit tests so that we are able to comply and say okay even if any of you guys contribute to the project 10:51.400 --> 10:56.280 we know that we won't break anything and that we still have the eye preference we are expecting from 10:56.280 --> 11:03.720 the firmware API as well as we want to introduce some eye interface in order to do some 11:03.720 --> 11:19.160 hardware and the loop and in fancy applications. Thank you yes I can wrap up I will quickly show you 11:19.480 --> 11:34.760 so I think so we did a quick demo demo video for today we tried to go over it a little bit quick 11:35.800 --> 11:41.880 the idea is that we can try to create a grid with two boards right in a grid there's a grid 11:41.880 --> 11:47.240 forming virtual that creates the AC wave and the grid what we call a grid following virtual 11:47.240 --> 11:52.680 there's an inverted that reads that that AC wave and then synchronizes with it so you can actually 11:52.680 --> 12:01.480 inject power into that grid right to do this you will need two three sports a power supply that will 12:01.480 --> 12:10.520 act as the battery or the voltage source a resistor which in this case represents our grid our load 12:11.480 --> 12:16.520 and a bunch of cables and of course there's always a little quick magic and everything is connected 12:16.520 --> 12:22.520 together and we have a grid forming and grid following we connect them to a computer here is 12:22.520 --> 12:30.600 using VS code we can go through the interface of platform IO and choose the example in this case 12:30.600 --> 12:37.720 there are grid forming grid following inverter we can download the example click compile to build it 12:38.440 --> 12:45.720 we can then click the arrow to flash the board that sends through the boot loader the code to 12:45.720 --> 12:51.640 the board and in this example we need to watch the data that's actually been received by the 12:51.640 --> 12:56.840 sensor so I put a little oscilloscope in there so we can have the real time data we turn it on 12:56.840 --> 13:03.320 in this case if you watch here the voltage goes to six volts in this case where the building is 13:03.320 --> 13:09.160 small 10 volt grid that's what it looks like for the grid forming that so it's creating an AC wave 13:09.960 --> 13:16.760 then we launch the synchronization so the grid following inverter which is on the right synchronizes 13:16.760 --> 13:23.960 and then it launches power so there's more power coming from the from the source and what we see 13:23.960 --> 13:31.560 here which is interesting is that the harmonics go everywhere goes crazy but what is seen by the load 13:31.560 --> 13:36.360 is to an AC wave which means it's a classic example of circulating currents between two 13:36.360 --> 13:41.400 inverters that we can study further and then can use this basic example as an example to understand 13:41.400 --> 13:48.760 and go on through it so as always if you want to contribute please show us your use cases bring us 13:52.360 --> 13:57.640 give us any hundred feedback real time enthusiasm folks please contact us because we need help on 13:57.640 --> 14:06.680 and the TSOs DSOs we're talking about MMCs and SSD so let's talk about that as well thank you