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Monitor Draws Zero Power In Standby
fifthace writes "A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby."
...when I see CRTs at work lighting up the room when they render "black".
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Then it just draws EXTRA power while running, to charge the capacitors. Electricity can't be produced from nothing.
A more useful version would be one that used solar cells on the top of the LCD to absorb the already expended energy of ambient lighting.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I believe the proper term is "hibernate". When my laptop is in standby, it still draws power. But when I close the lid on my laptop, and it goes into hibernation mode, it draws no power until I open the lid again. The same could be said of these monitors. They draw no power until a user does something analogous to me opening the lid on my laptop.
The game.
why can't people just be disciplined enough to switch off their monitors before leaving for home/office?
*AHEM* From TFA:
A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby.
The monitor might not, but what about the power brick? those things consume power even if no monitor is attached.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I just want an Off switch on my printers and scanners! Or if they do have one, put it in the front. I use my scanner once a month, it's crazy to leave it plugged in all the time (no power switch). My printer's power switch is way around at the back, hard to reach - I only print once or twice a week. At least my LCD has an off button on the front, but it is never really off.
Most use some sort of supervisory micro or other electronics to sense you pressing the power switch etc. It might draw very little power, but it isn't nothing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What do they consider standby?
I guess this is more save the planet stuff.
Now I need to buy new monitors, tv's, vcrs, dvd players, microwave, oven, unplug my clocks every day, etc.. Lots more aluminum smelted. Lots more resources used up. Lots more pollution, but we all can sleep better knowing the residential power demand may shrink by a fraction of a percent.
I'll get right on that after I scrap my relatively new car and buy a prius, and pull and toss all my perfectly functional lighing in favor of compact flourescent. And if we all pitch in, the rate of increase of power demand of this planet will slow by a probably incalculably small amount.
Why do individuals need to change their lives so radically, for an extremely minor, and likely insignificant payoff - all the while lining the pockets of the worlds leading polluters?
If my PC didn't have standby, it'd simply be on all the time, and so would yours - don't lie. This is all getting a little bit silly. Where are the real problem solvers, why are we waiting for government to solve these problems?
My solution? "Consume" as little as possible. I got a ton of shit already, I don't need anymore. We simply aren't going to buy our way to a cooler planet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The biggest wastage in taditional designs is that they use switch mode power supplies designed to run at full power. They don't operate very efficiently at very low (standby) power. It is far better to completely turn off the power supply and just use a local capacitor to keep the micro going.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I like this trend. If a device wants to consume 0 power on standby then it finally means that they'll stop putting those damn blue LEDs on everything electronic. Then I could have a dark bedroom at night without the use of electrical tape.
So does that mean I can pull the plug and have the monitor remain in standby mode?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I built a relay and cap circuit when I was in highschool to turn AC circuits on and off with a standard momentary push button. The result, zero stand-by current. holding the momentary switch completed a circuit which would cascade and latch a larger relay. This relay would hold itself closed until you interrupted the power. Simple, and makes a satisfying click.
I'm not sure how you can patent something that 1-2% of EE students discovered on their own.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Most very low power modern devices have nasty power factors. PC power supplies tend to be .6 to .8. CFLs run from about .2 to .6 while many phone charges are about .2. That means for every watt delivered to the phone, there line losses in the grid are at least 3 W if not more. There are also losses in the generator so getting 1 Watt into your phone (or CFL) may require more power than putting 5W into a resistive load.
Yes it's still a good thing, but meanwhile has anyone invented an airconditioner/heater or car that's much more efficient but at the same time as practical and as affordable as the conventional stuff?
My airconditioner uses at least 1kW. 1 hour of airconditioning = 20 days of monitor standby.
For those of you who live in countries that need central heating, the standby power isn't going to hurt as much during winter since you want stuff warmer anyway.
I need a better designed house (to reduce cooling bills etc), but I can't afford one... An "Energy Star" legislation for houses here might be good, but I'm worried the builders will just use it as a way to make a lot more money.
You are probably trolling, but just in case you actually mean it...
Have you looked at the oil price lately? Even if you are irrational enough to ignore the mountain of evidence for human caused global warming, you might still want to cut down on your energy bill and/or make the remaining oil on this planet last a little longer.
This is more of a stunt. It's relatively straightforward to design the control electronics for a display such that the electronics draws under a milliwatt in standby. The problem is how to get 1mW at 5V or so from the power line. Low-end switching power supplies don't even work right with no load, and better ones still draw a few percent of full-load current when unloaded. So you can't use the main power supply. Transformers have the same problem.
What's really needed are low-cost power supplies for obtaining something like a milliwatt from the power line without wasting more power than they deliver. But they have to be attached to the power line, and need the the protection circuitry and isolation for that. It's not something that can be done with a single IC.
One could power the standby electronics from an ultracapacitor, and when it gets low, bring up the main power supply for a few seconds for a recharge.
From the introductory blurb "uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power". Drawing on my memory from my hardware (as in soldering and breadboarding) geek phase (Z8 ForthChip anybody?) a capacitor acts like a battery so all this is doing is storing power before going into standby. That can't be saving power just shifting it around.
.sig - how quaint reminds of Usenet - is that still around? :Q
The next part (my opionion) is the one that makes this work (FTFA)->"Solar panels provide enough power to maintain zero consumption mode". Pretty nifty, I've seen solar panels used on automatic faucets to start the water - of course if we kept the faucets wouldn't need the power in the first place (I know also cuts down on germs, just saying)
So make sure to keep a lamp on nearby (or make sure direct sunlight hits the monitor, always good for usability!)
A
You wouldn't even need a capacitor in the sense of storage.
You would just need an RF diode coupled to the video input to be rectified and bias on the gate of a MOSFET that inturn drives a relay to connect mains power to the switchmode PSU.
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
46137
Is there a really cheap remote power control for appliances that I can control via PC/Linux, which will shut off all power, and drain the minimum while watching for the powerup signal? Bluetooth or other wireless, or even over the electric wires in the wall.
It seems to me like some kind of RFID type passive tech could do this with only the power from a RF signal itself to flip the transistors gating the appliance power on/off.
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make install -not war
You would just need an RF diode coupled to the video input to be rectified and bias on the gate of a MOSFET that inturn drives a relay to connect mains power to the switchmode PSU.
The crazy thing is, what took me 10 seconds to design in my head will probably be patented, and used to extort millions!!
I'm not sure this would work anyway: in order to power the MOSFET, wouldn't you need a power supply of some sort? Maybe if you used a triac instead, something like this might work.
For one, their math is not based in reality. These are numbers pulled out of their asses, with no backing as to if they are correct. However even if there is some truth, you run in to the fact that most people are using LCDs (and more convert all the time) and most LCDs are backwards. All LCDs run their backlights on full (or rather at the full level the user sets) at all times they are displaying. They work by blocking light. Well, the most common form of LCDs, the Twisted Nematic, are open by default. That is to say when there's no current across the junction, they pass the maximum amount of light. As such to turn black they need full power applied to the junction. They actually use more power to do black then white. There are LCDs that do not work this way (IPS and VA variants) but they are by far the minority on computer displays.
So a "Blackle" would increase power usage on LCD systems, which needs to be factored in.
If these people really care about saving energy, maybe they'd look to things like old, inefficient air conditioning units. ACs use power like no other appliance in a normal home. However there are many different quality levels out there. Good modern ones can move a lot more heat per unit of energy input. This is generally measured in a term called SEER, which means how many Btus of cooling a unit does per watt-hour of energy input. For old units SEER values of 9 or less are common. These days, you can't get less than 13 (by law) and you can get them over 20 SEER. That means that you'll be talking about a unit roughly twice as efficient at cooling. That is some major, major energy savings right there. Doesn't take a lot of that to equal their theoretical Google numbers, and this is backed up by reality.
VGA gets you 1V peak-to-peak at 75 ohms impedance (13 milliamps, probably per color). DVI gives you 5VDC @ 50mA through pins 14 and 15. The latter can drive a relay directly, the former would probably need a voltage multiplier circuit (which at those low voltages could probably be embedded on an IC, in fact you'd probably have to use schottky diodes) to charge a capacitor. Then you could use a voltage comparator op amp to dump the capacitor's energy into the relay quickly.
Practically no oil is going towards generating electricity on the grid.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Back in the day, devices came with nice red LEDs that didn't ruin your night vision. A nice coincidence with the fact that red ones were the first/easiest LEDs to make.
One problem with blue LEDs is that the human eye has poor sensitivity to blue, at least resolution-wise. There's a great example of this problem here in Jyvaskyla, a bicycle counter installed in a cycle path (probably using some inductive effect for detection, and intended to collect statistics for traffic planning). Its display consists entirely of blue LEDs, which probably looks cool to some people, but it's very hard to read, kind of defeating the purpose.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No, I'm not a Mac fanboi, but I did have a Mac IIfx. That, in common with most Macs of the day, would draw no power at all in standby mode, but could be woken with a keystroke. There was a relay in the PSU that shut off all power, and a small battery that kept the clock running. The power switch fired the relay in the PSU through a couple of capacitors, enough to turn on the supply for long enough to bring up one of the supply rails and hold the relay on.
A power consumption meter is essential to monitor the ghost loads of stuff around the house. The makers of the KillAWatt meter have a new model out so the old ones are just $16. Check out what your TV and DVD player are up to -- they waste just as much power as a monitor. When I found out how much, I put them on a power strip so I could switch them off -- *really* off -- easily when I go out of town.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715001
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Where does the micro come from?
/.ers don't, no matter what they think) then don't pretend to.
I realise that this is the third time that I've posted in this topic now, but FFS people if you don't know anything about discrete electronics (and most
I do know about it. It's my job to know about it. Standby power is part of what I do, I develop electronics for certain types of household goods. What they have done here is nothing new, except perhaps for the solar panel (it's unncessary, probably done for marketing reasons). It is trivial to build zero power standby circuits for most home appliances except those that use remotes to wake them up. It does not require magic, or micros, or cheating the laws of physics, or anything like that, what it does require is usually a little more cost. Hell, the standby power of most devices is double or triple what it could easily be because it saves a few cents, and a few cents on a few million items is a few years salary for a few engineers. In several of the designs I've done I've gone so far as tracking changes which would take standby power from ~1.5 Watts down to 0.2 Watts, they're on the PCB, but the parts are not fitted and the el-cheapo circuit is fitted instead. Because the beancounters said so.
Until governments require low standby powers on domestic equipment (and I mean really low, not energy star BS, although at least it's a start), manufacturers are going to continue the way they are because it's cheaper to make energy inefficient devices.
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
What's going on is that your eyes adjust how much light to let in based on, mostly, the blue part of the spectrum. Quite possibly this has something to do with the blue sky. If you live outdoors, the brightness of the sky is what is mainly controlling what you can see. This also lets you see incredibly well under a full moon.
If you have a blue light and a red light with the same candlepower, and light a room with each, each room is equally bright in the absolute sense. But in the blue room, your irises are closed too much relative to the room light, whereas in the red room they're open too much. (So you can see a lot better in the dark, although very strong red light can actually be dangerous as your eyes stupidly do not iris closed as much as they should.)
Or, to put it another way, your eyes take the blue light, multiple it by three, and assume that's how much RGB light is in the room. Roughly. It's probably more like R: 0.3 G: 0.7 B: 2.0, I'm sure the real numbers are out there somewhere.
There's a reason lights just offstage at a theatre are often blue...you can't see as well under them (Just well enough to avoid running into people.), but it 'ruins your night vision', or, in other words, 'fixes your day vision before you walk on stage into the lights'. (While at the same time, they're dim enough that you can't actually see into them from the house.)
Whereas, if you go further backstage, you'll find red ones, when people actually do need to operate with night vision.
And sometimes you find green ones. I haven't quite figured that one out. Hunters use green, I don't know why either. Possibly because so many animals are colorblind, so maybe it works like red and doesn't affect their 'eye brightness'. Whereas I know, with people green does actually affect it somewhere.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?