Despite the fact that we rely on them to power our appliances, devices, homes, and ultimately our lives, we don’t give them much thought. That lack of attention prevented the outlet from changing since its introduction by Harvey Hubbell in 1903. The problem is, every other device at every other point in our electrical grid, along with everything that it powers, has changed.

As a result of the outlet remaining largely unchanged, we currently have no solutions to energy waste, power management, automation, or building analytics that aren’t disruptive, inconvenient, expensive, or simply ineffective.

Smart grid

At Hubl, our response to this problem was to completely reengineer the device that everyone has ignored but relied on until this point – the outlet – and provide it with the functionality that it should have had long ago as our grid and our tech got smarter.

We decided it should be brought into the modern world in the same way that every other cornerstone technology has – with a computational brain and the power of the cloud. In doing so, the effectiveness of an entire electrical distribution system could be improved.

With a proverbial brain, Cloud connectivity, and machine learning capabilities, the Hubl outlet is the first outlet to catch up to the devices it powers.

FCC certification

As with all systems that learn about their users, maximizing effectiveness requires a large user base. We also knew that money would be tight – typical startups don’t need UL and FCC certification, they don’t sell wholesale and b-to-b in large volumes, and they don’t devise business plans that assume all of that from the beginning. We would have to buckle down to build an elegant, high-performance, embedded platform the right way, with the right tools, the late nights, and the attention to detail necessary to disrupt a 100+ year old technology and a 20+ year old standard for startup launches.

The engineers in us, however, persevered. We built our own embedded hardware platform on Ti’s CC3220SF for our own PCBs and to the form factor and manufacturing volume we knew we needed. Amazon’s robust web hosting services such as IoT, Kinesis, and S3 allowed us to scale, and a portable embedded C platform, made in-house, prevented us from having to rely on restrictive third party APIs.

SamacSys

Tools like those provided by SamacSys were absolutely integral to keeping our designs airtight and well-organized. Fledgling companies without employee numbers or pricey EDAs soon discover the difficulty in organizing multiple teams to converge on a design with a tight deadline without the help of expensive software or services to speed things up.

NOTE: The SamacSys tool is available from the main navigation bar on Electronics Weekly, simply hover your mouse on ‘Resources’ to see the option for ‘Component Search Engine’.

When we discovered SamacSys, we were able to completely forget about library management, and that made all the difference.

Moving from bread-boarded proof-of-concept to printed PCB was no longer an organisational nightmare. Because of their services and those like them, in 2019 alone, we plan on saving university campuses over ten million dollars in wasted energy with deployments in the thousands of units. Needless to say, we’ll be keeping our component libraries with SamacSys.

By Hubl staff.

If you would like to learn more about what Hubl is building and how you can join the movement as an investor, engineer, or client, visit hubltech.com, or contact info@hubltech.com.

See also: SamacSys powers our Component Search Engine