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Issue #204 July 2007
Pyxos Power
by Tom Cantrell
If your project is in need of a standard network or has wiring concerns, nodes, or a complex protocol, Echelon’s Pyxos FT chip may be the perfect fit. Tom explains how it will give you the reliability, security, and power of wires without the mess.
Start | LAN-In-the-Box |Down to the Wire | Variable Interest | Hook 'Em Danno |Build it and they will come | Match point | Sources and PDF
With all the action on the wireless front that I’ve been covering lately (e.g., Wireless USB, WiMedia, ZigBee, etc.), you’d think wires were an endangered species. Au contraire. There are still a lot of places where wires make sense from a reliability and security perspective, not to mention the small matter of distributing power.
If wires are still a good thing, that’s not to ignore the fact that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Recently, my clothes dryer went on the fritz. After popping the hood, I discovered a rat’s nest of wires running hither and yon between the control panel, motor, and various sensors. Just a reminder that old-school wiring lash-ups persist in many blue-collar embedded apps.
Is there a way to enjoy the beauty of wires with less of the beastly aspects? Echelon has got a new gadget, the Pyxos FT chip, that does just that (see Figure 1).
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| Figure 1—Consider the Pyxos FT chip kind of a network transceiver on steroids. In addition to differential signaling for range and noise immunity, it handles higher layers of the network protocol so you don’t have to. |
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