Blog

Sundry blogs by the UD Team spanning topics in energy, automation, iot, and AI.

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IPSO Alliance Co-Chair


We are proud and excited to announce that Michel Kohanim is now the co-chair of IPSO Alliance’s Semantic Working Group. IPSO Alliance’s mission is to enable IoT devices hardware and software interoperability between disparate physical and virtual entities across different frameworks and protocols.

“Having the opportunity to work with IPSO Alliance members and IoT industry leaders in refining and shaping the future of IoT interoperability is a privilege and in full alignment with our goals and roadmaps as a company,” said Michel Kohanim, CEO of Universal Devices, Inc.
With the ubiquity of IoT devices, and after more than 10 years of experience in automation, energy management, and device/protocol development, it became clear that the old paradigm of defining the whole world, developing/compiling drivers for each type of device and/or variations thereof, testing, and updating firmware is neither efficient nor sustainable. In this respect, for the past 3 years and under the leadership of our CTO, Chris Jahn, UDI has been hard at work coming up with a meta language – Node Meta Model (NMM) – that defines how things in the world can be described, understood, and integrated at runtime (rather than compile time) and, in short, behave as semantically interoperable. Our 5.0x ISY firmware, includes native support for NMM and Polyglot – our Proof of Concept Python based NMM client library. ISY and Polyglot seamlessly integrate such disparate things as Nest, Sonos, Lifx, Kodi, Phillips Hue, and even an Outback battery/storage inverter.
“This is the future of IoT and I strongly encourage all the IoT makers and device manufacturers to join us at IPSO Alliance and help shape the future”, said Kohanim.

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$3.2M CEC Grant (GFO 15-311/Group 2)

Based on years of experience in the fields of energy management, automation, and IoT – and in conjunction with expertise provided by Dr. Cazalet (the father of Transactive Energy) – Universal Devices, Inc. proposed RATES (Retail Automated Transactive Energy System) as response to California Energy Commission’s Grant Funding Opportunity GFO 15-311/Group 2 Solutions That Allow Customers To Manage Their Energy Demand.


Universal Devices, Inc. is proud to announce CEC’s approval of RATES proposal and a $3.2M award for implementing and pilot testing the solution in Southern California Edison’s territory.
RATES is based on the premise that customers should be empowered with making decisions on their energy usage and all costs associated thereto. In order to achieve this goal, RATES proposes that customers subscribe to and pay for energy usage at regular intervals. A low cost, autonomous, off-the-shelf and IoT based Automation/Energy Management System (ISY) is utilized to take customer preferences, sensory, Smart Meter/Inverter, and environmental information (including DER), and then applying an algorithm to either automatically shift load usage, or purchase additional energy (at spot prices) while excess energy is credited. Another very important feature of RATES is that it completely does away with any type of measurement/verification, baselines, prepaid rebates/incentives and all the exorbitant associated operational/administrative costs that go with these activities.
In addition to our gratitude to CA tax payers and CEC, Universal Devices, Inc. wishes to thank the following organizations for their support of this innovative and revolutionary project:
CAISO
Southern California Edison
OpenADR Alliance

For detailed specification and architecture, please visit our RATES page.
For more information, please contact us at businessrelations@universal-devices.com.

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