Open architecture to raise awareness of energy consumption on the home environment

The climate changes as well as the sustainability of our energy supplies present multiple challenges and require a worldwide coordinated response. Europe 2020 is a jigsaw of policies and measures binding targets for 2020 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, ensure 20% of renewable energy sources in the EU energy mix, and the reduction of EU global primary energy use by 20%. In the longer term, new generations of technologies have to be developed via breakthroughs in research if we are to meet the greater ambition of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050. The reduction of the primary energy use can be accomplished with mentality awareness of the home users. By educating ourselves and those around us, our negative behaviors can be changed, creating a culture of sustainability. In order to achieve this goal, we are suggesting an open architecture with a friendly visualization interface that can be used to raise the households inhabitants awareness o f their power consumption. With the proposed architecture, energy consumption data can be stored in a remote server and can be further processed in order to extract the power consumption for each electrical appliance, opening the door to the development of service extensions to provide user- and context-aware advice on how to save energy

LAMBDA 2M GaAs—A multi-megapixel hard X-ray detector for synchrotrons

Synchrotrons can provide very intense and focused X-ray beams, which can be used tostudy the structure of matter down to the atomic scale. In many experiments, the quality of theresults depends strongly on detector performance; in particular, experiments studying dynamics ofsamples require fast, sensitive X-ray detectors.“LAMBDA” is a photon-counting hybrid pixel detector system for experiments at synchrotrons,based on the Medipix3 readout chip. Its main features are a combination of comparatively smallpixel size (55μm), high readout speed at up to 2000 frames per second with no time gap betweenimages, a large tileable module design, and compatibility with high-Z sensors for efficient detectionof higher X-ray energies.A large LAMBDA system for hard X-ray detection has been built using Cr-compensated GaAsas a sensor material. The system is composed of 6 GaAs tiles, each of 768 by 512 pixels, giving asystem with approximately 2 megapixels and an area of 8.5 by 8.5 cm2. While the sensor uniformityof GaAs is not as high as that of silicon, its behaviour is stable over time, and it is possible to correctnonuniformities effectively by postprocessing of images. By using multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernetdata links, the system can be read out at the full speed of 2000 frames per second.The system has been used in hard X-ray diffraction experiments studying the structure ofsamples under extreme pressure in diamond anvil cells. These experiments can provide insightinto geological processes. Thanks to the combination of high speed readout, large area andhigh sensitivity to hard X-rays, it is possible to obtain previously unattainable information inthese experiments about atomic-scale structure on a millisecond timescale during rapid changes ofpressure or temperature