| Capstone Project: Power over Ethernet Controller | |
| Clients: Professor Edmond Cretu, UBC Nathan Wiens, Systems Engineer, Cisco Systems Inc. | |
| Student Team: Yaodong (Tom) Yu, Ruibing Zhao, Yuqian (Peter) Zhang, Yuan Liu, Zhen (William) Hong | |
| Professor: Paul Lusina |
Normally, electronics come with lots of wires. Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) technology delivers both power and data communication over a single Ethernet cable. This cable can deliver enough power to support small electronics like IP phones and surveillance cameras. Using one cable significantly increases flexibility and unity of electronics in a small space while also reducing the material and installation costs.
“The Internet of Things” (everyday objects that can send and receive information and also react) will need power. This capstone team developed a controller module to apply PoE technology to the concept of the Internet of Things. By integrating various sensors and electronics into the module, they created a network that could conveniently monitor and analyze the environment and power consumption. The ultimate goal of this capstone is to develop the technology that will help to power the electronics that would be used to create smarter homes or workplaces.
The Power over Ethernet project was attractive to this student team because it touched on so many areas of electrical and computer engineering like, sensor circuit design, firmware development and software-hardware integration. “Some of our most exciting moments were getting the first sensor to read a value on on the Raspberry Pi and the first time we transferred packets of data from the PoE controller to the client window.” The team sees great potential for PoE to integrate technology more seamlessly into our daily life.
Part way through the year the team had a setback. “After about a month and half into the implementation of the firmware components, we realized there was a deficiency in the library we chose for the communication protocol and without it, the value and potential of our project would drop dramatically. After consultation with our client, we decided to take a few weeks to find a new open-source library we could use and migrated the code we wrote.” Ultimately, the team discovered this was important time to take for the success and longevity of the project. With the superior communications protocol the results of this project will likely be used as the starting point for projects next year and the client can develop more specific applications based on the platform delivered by the team.
Project overview: A Data Centre (a laptop) actively sends requests to our PoE Controller Module over Ethernet connections. The PoE Controller Module is connected to multiple sensors (both data and power interface), treating them as “resources”. Upon request, the PoE Controller Module, using CoAP communication protocol, will acquire information from the resources to send back to the Data Centre.
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