Hello everybody, thank you very much for welcoming us again.
It's our third time we come here at the Energy Devroom, we're happy to be here again.
I am Luis Villa and I'm Jolini and we both are part of the Antec team.
The Dontec is a foundation and I start up dedicated to open source power electronics
hardware, so the magic boxes that we use to either drive motors or send energy into the
grid.
Our mission is to give people the tools that they need to act for the energy transition.
Of course, we don't did this only the choice.
We also have a Clément Fouche who works a lot on helping us with the core development.
And from the past few months, we have Andreas Siebe, who is a social professor in
Argentina who has been helping us a lot with the power hardware design as well.
So what is Dontec?
The idea of Dontec is to provide people with a send-box system through which we can develop
hardware or software for power and energy.
So it can integrate academia, industry, and makers into this single technology sandbox
and allow for new ideas and new talents to eventually come out.
That's all, that's all we hope for.
We have so far developed three products, two of which are in the market already, the twist
and the onverter shields.
So these are shields for the microcontroller, which is the little board that you see in
each one of our standard boards.
We've commercializing them, they are in a few universities in France and in Europe now
in Argentina as well.
The idea is that we have modules which can be connected in parallel and we can raise power.
That's what you see on our standalone and rack mounts.
Dontverter is for drive-in motors up to kilowatt and the powerverter is the onverter version
for few kilowatt's, six or more.
There's a design is coming out, it's going to come out this year and it's a total modular
design which means we assemble these modules to create the onverter, the powerverter.
At each time we have the same controller which means that we have the same software stack
that drives all of these systems.
So this software stack is quite specific to power electronics because it requires
a hard-wheel-time scheduling and specific features and functions and we build that ecosystem
and this framework on top of the VR Artors, which is one of the biggest Linux foundation
project that is very popular and we've written some specific drivers for that power
ecosystem.
So we are basically able to tackle from the silicon and the power electronics use case.
They arrive from these drivers and these APIs and on top of that we build some graphical
interface that we call modular, what is that enables you to plot through graphical interface
and kind of plots and data and so on.
Here we are not really aiming at IoT features and so on but mostly on how you tackle
down from the silicon up to the power topologies that will be useful for your use case
and application.
So we have two things, a graphical interface as I mentioned, but also an idea, IDE sorry
that enables you to get going and get started quite easily and so this is what is under
the hood, software always.
So as we mentioned so far we are a small startup and a foundation in other CNRS ages which
is the national research and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.
And we are aiming at having also a direct impact more direct impact because so far we
are re-advanced in academia and together with universities and so on so we spread this
knowledge and it is now how it is really critical to the energy transition but the goal
is also to have a more direct impact on key topics on the slightly as immobility for instance
or energy access or energy independence which are quite close by in the end but tackle
different zones in the world basically and also today is about energy access and energy
independence.
We believe that in order to have a such a direct impact and propose something that everyone
can bring in his home, a solar micro inverter would be really cool to have open source
so everyone could develop and be part of this openness movement around the energy access and
energy independence because it is at the individual scale so everyone can get going, test,
put it in his garden, in his roof, in his balcony and yeah it's really, it really
permits to cross this boundary between north and south and countries where we have like different
problems but maybe we can centralize some good design procedures and try to cross the borders
through this knowledge and how. So yeah the purpose and manifesto is united with them to make
inverters no longer black boxes so we are as I mentioned as I mentioned impact driven and we
aim at tackling this challenge together as a community and the idea is that maybe together we can
manage to decentralize both the design and maybe the manufacturing down the line okay and why it's
important it's because it permits to redeem sovereignty on key knowledge and know how and also on
data because so far we are stuck with critical pieces of infrastructure maybe we have a
data logger in the house that is taking our consumption or production and it's sending it to a
foreign cloud okay and so from this manifesto we derived some really early specs
so basically I won't go through the table in detail but the idea is to get a small micro inverted
for two small solar panels or one big solar panel which stands for 450 VA so yeah quite a small
production but something that is that everyone can handle at home so this is one of the early
hardware rendering the prototypes are in the production now so we don't have them to to put them today
but hopefully in few weeks we will be loving a preliminary test results and and I would like to assess
the challenges that goes with creating such open source micro inverters I mean it's power so
it it has some risks involved and it has some strong compliance to be ensured and to be granted
to these kind of things because interact with the grid they have high voltage they have fire risks
as well and so there is this high constraints and compliance so we will have to go as a company
freeze this compliance testing in order to have these projects tested and and compliance and
safe for the end users so this is one one of the key challenges associated with that and also
robustness because it's really hard from a design perspective to be able to save the design
and the hardware will deploy in the field will be resilient in ten years from now okay but the
thing is what we believe is if we tackle these challenges as a community and not as a single company
we can make it beneficial ecosystem for everyone and also having this shared technical comments
can end up in like really community-based projects that are not known as micro inverters but maybe
bigger inverters or other products that are really important for the energy transition
so just to give a quick detail so on the right those are the challenges and hardware they're very
similar challenges to the firmware as well on the right we've drawn what is the topology of the
system so the system that you see on the left you see the little microcontroller on the left
bit below the cables there I put the we put the microcontroller here on the top as well so all this
control which are the blue box and the red one they have to fit into the microcontroller and
basically what's happening here is that the control part the software will have to handle the pd so
does put the pd into maximum production raise this voltage to 400 volts and from those 400 volts
invert it synchronize with the grid and inject into the grid so far what we have done is that we have
the blue boxes the blue boxes are stuff that we have already done either through the previous
boxes sorry converters we had the opportunity to build those that called in part of the code that we
don't have like the grid compliance are stuff that we're working on and obviously we will work on together
so everyone is very welcome to choose this first blocks of ecosystem that we're trying to
build together I would like to reiterate many things to all the underlying ecosystem open source
ecosystem that permits this kind of project to exist namely Ticad which is one of the most brilliant
open source program I know of because I'm a huge user of that but also many of the projects that
are less known like Libosola that developed many power converters for the solar industry but also
some nice IoT ecosystem that we are using and the in-axis foundation that will we will collaborate
with to try to manufacture this prototypes in Kenya so we are trying from the start to see how we can
decentralize manufacturing so we have different ways of procuring this this inverter I won't go into the
details but we have also a community documentation center a GitHub that is all by the foundation
forum and a discord server and I would like to take the opportunity in one minute to show you
what is inside and behind this QR code so you can take a look and eventually if you leave a star
who will be more than happy uh tech I will switch screen and manage really quickly so this is
guy card yeah so what is an inverter an inverter is both a schematic and a layout
will quickly go through this schematic if I manage yeah yeah please and then maybe you can show the
3D model life so everyone can show and and maybe in between if you have any question so we have
the demo running yeah okay so this is what you can download from now and of course you are very
welcome if you have issues or improvement so there is a small contribute dot mdfi where everyone can
tackle the challenge if they feel so or if you will know some people that are in this vibe of a
point source and our family always power electronics yes so they tend to have yeah so the question is why
don't we use the electronic capacitors and what we replace them with actually we replace them with
a big box the grey box there that are film capacitors that have better lifespan yes
so the question is about the limits of the license so the project is license and the
the sound open out to our license strongly reciprocant so this license is meant to provide you
also right from an open source license so to study to modify to sell so you have also to share
to sell so if you make modification you have to share them back so the question is when the
project will be available in market well at the moment it's prototyping phase so we will have to
go for the compliance testing and so on so there is some risk involved in that process but I think
in one year for now we might have the first results and we try to go for a crowd supply project so
it's a platform where you can distribute open source hardware projects so it's quite specific but
it's a crowdfunding platform basically do you see your open batteries on this like go to the grid
so the question is about how we can integrate batteries with that kind of products
so regular micro inverters does not cover the problematic of adding batteries micro inverters are
located physically close to the solar panel so maybe on the rooftop or in the garden in the balcony
whereas usually battery inverters are in a small cabinet or okay so it's a different
product but we took that into the design consideration so we can extend in the future
can slightly change the topology and be able to integrate batteries that's an
step but big part of the job is making it a grid compliance and having a technical comment that
it take that challenge once we have that it will be easier for everyone to deploy a
product in the market either with batteries or with them yes
is this design intended to only be reconnected or I'm just thinking if you're
you're targeting the staff which may have grid reliability issues
so the question is about is it meant to be only grid connected or it could be potentially
doing grid for me so yeah this is something that is inside the firmware so you can change the
behavior of the inverter the problem there is that as there is no storage you cannot
operate it fully in grid for me because as soon as there is a lack of sun you won't have yeah
you won't have energy anymore but yeah you can tune the algorithm to make it partly grid for me
thank you guys