The Tesseract by Anacle has 200x the computing power of a regular meter, and gives us more information we thought we’d get from monitoring electric currents.
There is information in your electric current. How much? Enough to create better cities.
According to Anacle Founder Alex Lau, there is a massive amount of information trapped in the electric current and we only extract less than 1 per cent of that information. Smart meters that exist in the market today mainly record consumption – more accurately than previous versions, but still just consumption.
So how exactly will we extract the remaining 99 per cent of the information in the electric current? And what kind of information can we get that could lead to better, smarter cities?
Anacle’s answer is the Tesseract.
First in the world smart meter with more computing power, more capabilities
“[A few years back] in one of our product meetings, all the engineers started giving suggestions for incremental improvement. We started to do some cost estimates and we realised that the additional cost to increase the power of regular smart meters adds only about 10 to 20 per cent to the cost,” Lau said.
But they did not stop at incremental improvement. To create the Tesseract, they went over the maximum computing power of all available smart meters globally – about 200 times more.
The Tesseract behaves like a regular electricity meter in that it measures the electrical current that passes through it. But because of its greater computing power, it can do a lot of processing that regular smart meters cannot do.
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For example, it has enough computing power to run its own operating system, enabling it to adapt and transform its capabilities when new technology is developed. “In the same way smartphones can run different apps and update them when needed,” Lau explains.
This means that once installed, the Tesseract analyses the electrical current and extracts data such as what appliances or equipment are being used, when they are used, what causes increased consumption, and other information, all from the single line of electric current that goes into Tesseract.
As an example, Lau said that the Tesseract gives them data about energy trends in Anacle’s office. “I have a lot of information about behavioural statistics about my staff,” said Lau, pertaining to the Tesseract being able to get information about each individual’s working patterns by analysing their machines.
And because the Tesseract analyses electric current patterns, it can predict when equipment might fail, allowing businesses and factories to take pre-emptive measure, preventing actual failure and losses.
These algorithms to analyse electric currents are not new, but it is only with the Tesseract that they can be used commercially today. “A lot of the innovation is not from us. The algorithm has been around since 1950s but they require so much computing power that it’s only now that the device is capable of handling and extracting commercial value from them,” Lau said.
A world of possibilities
The Tesseract’s capabilities open up a world of possibilities.
If you think about it in the context of smart cities, for example, the Tesseract can play a huge role in supporting its pillars.
“One of the challenges of smart cities is that it is quite expensive to realise. There is a lot of hardware, communications, and software,” said Lau.
The health sector is one that can utilise the capabilities of the Tesseract for better, smarter service. An example given by Lau is how the device can monitor and alert if there is a possible emergency situation by analysing electrical patterns; if one day no one turns on the light in a home where a senior resident lives, maybe a check should be done to make sure nothing untoward happened to the senior.
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Transportation is another sector that the Tesseract can impact, predicting when major equipment are about to fail so that it can be addressed.
“If you have a million Tesseracts around a country, it creates a vast network of smart devices that can provide data needed for capabilities that can be utilised for security, health, transport, and other smart city pillars through the electrical grid,” Lau said.
The strength is in the Tesseract’s longevity; it is designed to last up to thirty years, easily outliving the standard computing chips that last only up to three years. This, along with it’s computing power, means that the Tesseract can be tasked with a myriad of things – from something as simple as managing energy consumption to creating an electrical grid that can be used for city-level security – without worrying about constant short-term maintenance.
“The Tesseract is a prime example of an IoT device that promotes edge computing,” Lau said. “And edge computing opens up the possibilities to distribute processing and do a lot of computing and functions. There is no cap on imagination.”
Facing resistance
New technology often faces a lot of hurdles. One of the challenges that Anacle faced when building the Tesseract is hardware based.
“A lot of the computing chips are designed for short life consumer electronics – they are designed to fail in 2-3 years. We needed to do something that lasts 20-30 years,” Lau said.
On the market front, Lau said that while there are those willing to explore new technologies, there will always be people who are resistant. “We hope with the increasing trend of the world digitalising, such a group will become smaller and smaller.”
To address this, Anacle is seeking out new markets that are more forward looking and make successful case studies that they could bring to the more hesitant markets in Southeast Asia. They are also working on bringing down the cost of the Tesseract and building an ecosystem of applications that would ramp up its capabilities – all to make it accessible to more people and markets.
Said Lau, “The vision for the Tesseract is to transform the energy industry and open up a gold mine that nobody is able to tap, and enable smart cities to achieve things no one has seen before.”
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Disclosure: this article was produced by the e27 content marketing team, sponsored by Accreditation@SGD. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Accreditation@SGD.
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