Putting battery profiling on every engineer’s desk
Qoitech in Sweden has dropped the annual license for its battery profiling tools to boost the adoption of the technology in development.
Qoitech develops power analysis, profiling and optimization tools for embedded systems for accurate matching of power sources to IoT devices and emulation of real-world operating conditions.
This can eliminate or reduce the need to change batteries over the life of these devices, avoiding energy wastage that can be up to 50% of the original battery capacity.
Battery life is a key challenge for many designers. Increasingly the performance of the cells needs to be profiled for temperature and the specific current drain of the application.
“We are in the business of making every electronics long lived, “ Vanja Samuelsson, tells eeNews Europe. “We are bringing profiling to the benchtop and the whole stack for continuous integration and software deployment.”
“People are finally understanding that we are giving people the data to choose wisely, and we want to collaborate with the battery makers,” he said.
The power supply and battery simulator are available from distributors such as DigiKey, Mouser and RS, and the profiler and simulation tools can be downloaded.
The company has dropped its $199 per annum license subscription previously charged for the Pro version of its software suite as it upgrades this to Otii Software 3.5. All the Pro features for Otii Ace and Otii Arc test hardware are now offered free of charge. These include simultaneous recording of multiple power profiles, unlimited time for recording, UART debugging, and many more functions.
The Otii Ace Pro and Otii Arc Pro each combine a power profiler, DC energy analyzer, smart power supply, digital multimeter, source measure unit, and power debugger in one box.
The Qoitech Otii power profiling tools n the benchtop
The Otii Arc Pro power supply is up to 5 V and has a sampling rate of 4ksps while the Otii Ace Pro extends this to 25 V and features a sampling rate of up to 50 ksps. Both are used to evaluate the dynamic power profiles of IoT-embedded systems and the power characteristics of batteries and energy harvesting systems.
“Offering Otii Software 3.5 free of charge will not only enable advanced functionality immediately after downloading the software but will save a typical customer at least $2,000 over the operating life of our products,” she said.
Where required, license fees are still payable for more advanced battery analysis and automation tools, either as annual fees or as a perpetual license which are more acceptable for company procurement systems.
“Some companies can’t set up supplier agreements with small companies so we make it easier to buy,” she said. “We have a basic license and a professional license and to buy all the addons you need the professional license. What we realised was the accessibility of the license model is not really there, we wanted to make it simple so you buy from the distributor, download the software and get started.”
“As the product matures then you need QA, that’s where the scaling comes for test, production, hardware version, benchmarking of components, networks, energy harvesting
“To do all the scaling with automation, Otii automation toolbox for scripting in Java or Python, that is under subscription and license,” she said.
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