Hello everyone, it's nice to be here again from last year.
We are on tech.
We're going to present our work in the update we had since last year.
Just to show our hands how many of you have heard of us or seen our work.
Not that many people.
It's just wonderful.
So we're going to introduce ourselves to new people.
My name is Louis.
On tech is our objective is to democratize access to power electronics, which is the fundamental
building blocks of the energy grid.
And I am the co-founder with John of the on tech foundation and the on tech startup.
So I am the president of the foundation.
And I'm leading the startup business counterpart.
And of course, somebody has got to do the hard work.
We have Clima, who's in the back of the room, who's without his great work.
We will not be able to have the software up and running.
How many of you have heard of power electronics?
Just show hands of most of you.
Wonderful.
So they are the building blocks of all the grid.
In electric vehicles, we find inverters, we find non-bore chargers, the electric vehicle market
is growing.
There's fierce competition in there.
There's also a small mobility in our e-bikes.
We see again increasing the man for this sort of intermediary power vehicles.
It's the same power electronics architecture.
We talk about inverters again, speed controllers.
We get the on-board charging.
We get into PV inverters.
Well, we have string inverters at this scale of big PV plants or even household plants.
So we also have micro inverters for ACPV to...
So for balcony grid, at lower voltages.
We also have grid connections.
We find MMCs, which are big power converters for connecting different parts of the grid.
We also have SSDs, which are solid state transformers, where we leverage power electronics
to build transformers, which are smaller, smaller footprint.
And we also talk about storage.
We can see in batteries or H2 bidirection inverters, charging these batteries.
And these batteries cost about 30 cents for what hour, with having a great impact on
how the grid works today.
So all this creates a complexity barrier.
That means that electronics are everywhere.
We need to manufacture these electronics, we need to maintain these electronics.
And it means that we need to go faster in our AD.
And there is this scarcity of actually people who can do this work.
There's less and less people who actually know how to get inside this complexity barrier.
And we believe that people learn by doing.
They have to solve problems which they care for.
They want to provide less trustee, you know, for their neighbors.
They want to have a sustainable community next door.
They want to have access to clean and renewable and cheap energy to themselves and to the
people around them.
So what we are trying to do at Don't Tech is we're trying to do in the power sector, in
the power electronics, what Arduino and Raspberry Pi did in the industry from ethics and
the informatics sector.
We introduce hardware that is easy to use, reprogrammable, and then can be leveraged to create
a sort of a power computer.
I'm taking over on that and so how can you do that?
How can you do the Arduino of or is the Raspberry Pi of electronics?
It's quite hard because it's usually application specific, right?
You have like this black box that depends on the application you are targeting.
And in the end it boils down to having a small brain that does the fast calculation and
does the math that is involved into controlling the power flow and muscles that will
act on the power flow and realize your target application and make it a reality.
So in our case what we've done is we've divided the brain and the muscles so that you can
use Ivers' brain itself and use your own muscles if you are a power electronics engineer
and you have like your own converter, you can embed an open source firmware that contains
all the APIs that you need to know to control the power flow and this is what the spin
board is about, it's a small tiny board that you can embed on your own topology
on your own power converter and control your power flow with open, open firmware.
And so it aims at targeting a wide audience, right, so control engineers are not really
familiar with the embedded microcontroller huge manuals and pages, they want to just focus
on math lab stuff and so we provide a convenience, he's grease, a graphical interface and
math lab plugins, you know, to comply with the different ergonomics of the different
crowd that is involved into making power electronics, sorry, and then we have like the muscles
and so for that what we do is we leverage what we call power shields which are addons that
do a specific function according to the need of the user and so what we've done is we've
done power shields that are modular and that can communicate among different modules
and so that you can reach your power level depending on how many power modules you will
power in and so this is how it works. So what we've done in V1 in V1 we came up with a
comprehensive firmware that has plenty of features related to power electronics, right, so it
must be an odd real-time compatible, so if you are not able to control your power flow and
you skip one control step everything will crash, so you need to ensure that your control
flow will be applied at every time step and then you have like plenty of functions that
depends on that specific domain of power electronics. So what we've built is something that
is comprehensive enough so that you can go from the silicon to the power transistors, to
the power topology and control it with this open firmware. So under the hood there is
a Zeferatos which is one of the big projects of the Linux Foundation which does the
big job of being future proof and having like all nice, eye-level drivers and so on and
what we've built is some custom made drivers to target the specific application of
power electronics. So what is now upstream in in the last release candidate are actually
we were supposed to really there is a version today but we'll be late if we have a few
comments away. Anyway what we've done is we've made it quite simple, usually in embedded world
it's always really odd, you have like this well known sentence. Yeah well first you have
to install the tool chain and then install the dependencies and run a weird script and
eventually we compile the source and it may blink, right? So what we are trying to do is
doing it done simple for people that are not IT specialists because they are application
specialists are related to I don't know. Automotive or greed or whatever but they are
not expecting embedded world, right? So we have like diminished the complexity barrier for
that and so we have like Loki examples that just you press a button and you download all
the dependency by itself it will compile and you will be able to try it in a minute.
And so we came up this year with a new documentation center that explains everything with
human-made documentation which is not only doxygen or auto-generated so that you can have
like anti-commence and insightful examples in order to do some real-life power applications.
And also we've merged a really nice feature is that like now you don't need a fancy oscilloscope
in order to debug your application you can just take the board itself using embedded sensors
and retrieve this live data that is pulled by the board itself really fast and so you get
like this kind of nice waveforms where you can see your grid slowly forming in this case it's
a motor application. So I was saying we split it the brain and the muscles and you know we
are at first them so we cannot do a presentation without having a code slide. So here is how
you have like a manifest that describe your hardware and then from that if you are the power guy
you just have to describe which sensors on the board which are the power transistors that will
render the topology and from there you can use the generic firmware that we've built to control
your application. So you are not necessarily tied to the power shield that we've developed
anyone can join with their specificity and their specific application and from there we cannot
create this power book of different power shields. So yeah the stable version is about to come
because I think I will throw away. And like I will go really fast because we are falling short of time
and we have like a small video showing a demo. But the other word we're going to be is basically
creating partial that are more and more powerful and also having like a new module that will
create and permits new applications and we also have like new things where we are able now to
parallel these modules as I was explaining before it's not only a schematic it's a reality and we are
working out really hard not not to be able only to parallel the modules but also to place them
in series to do kind of MNCs or advanced applications that could be really interesting for the future.
Lastly and what's coming next regarding the software because I think it's really important to
showcase what's the roadmap of the project. So now we are at the V1 step right we have multiple
improvements that will be done in this year which are related to the scheduling and the
hard real time part that is specific to par electronics but also we want to embed some other
unit tests so that we are able to comply and say okay even if any of you guys contribute to the project
we know that we won't break anything and that we still have the eye preference we are expecting from
the firmware API as well as we want to introduce some eye interface in order to do some
hardware and the loop and in fancy applications. Thank you yes I can wrap up I will quickly show you
so I think so we did a quick demo demo video for today we tried to go over it a little bit quick
the idea is that we can try to create a grid with two boards right in a grid there's a grid
forming virtual that creates the AC wave and the grid what we call a grid following virtual
there's an inverted that reads that that AC wave and then synchronizes with it so you can actually
inject power into that grid right to do this you will need two three sports a power supply that will
act as the battery or the voltage source a resistor which in this case represents our grid our load
and a bunch of cables and of course there's always a little quick magic and everything is connected
together and we have a grid forming and grid following we connect them to a computer here is
using VS code we can go through the interface of platform IO and choose the example in this case
there are grid forming grid following inverter we can download the example click compile to build it
we can then click the arrow to flash the board that sends through the boot loader the code to
the board and in this example we need to watch the data that's actually been received by the
sensor so I put a little oscilloscope in there so we can have the real time data we turn it on
in this case if you watch here the voltage goes to six volts in this case where the building is
small 10 volt grid that's what it looks like for the grid forming that so it's creating an AC wave
then we launch the synchronization so the grid following inverter which is on the right synchronizes
and then it launches power so there's more power coming from the from the source and what we see
here which is interesting is that the harmonics go everywhere goes crazy but what is seen by the load
is to an AC wave which means it's a classic example of circulating currents between two
inverters that we can study further and then can use this basic example as an example to understand
and go on through it so as always if you want to contribute please show us your use cases bring us
give us any hundred feedback real time enthusiasm folks please contact us because we need help on
and the TSOs DSOs we're talking about MMCs and SSD so let's talk about that as well thank you