Installation Guide

2 Introduction
Overview of the ECN 7000 Series
Residential and commercial energy customers are increasingly focused energy
efficiency and reliability, while also reducing the environmental impact of
electricity use. National and regional power distribution grids in the 21
st
century
must address these customer concerns, while at the same time monitoring
electricity as it flows through many types of devices and transmission media
(substation elements, high, medium, and low voltage power lines, capacitor
banks, transformers, meters, communicating thermostats, load-control devices,
and so on).
A modern smart power grid network must be able to manage itself using
intelligent distributed control and be able to communicate with any device, over
any network or protocol, to optimize grid operations and anticipate problems
before they occur.
The Echelon Edge Control Node (ECN) 7000 Series of open and extensible
hardware products enable power distribution grids to become smarter. The ECN
7000 Series distributes the intelligence that public and private electrical power
utilities need to monitor and control devices at the edge of the grid. The edge of
the grid is the critical point where the distribution network connects to customers
and where energy supply and demand are becoming increasingly unpredictable
and complex.
The ECN 7000 Series of products use the Echelon Control Operating System
(COS) software platform, which provides the open, secure and modular software
framework needed to host hundreds of new applications needed for a smarter
grid. This powerful combination of hardware and software brings intelligent
distributed control to the edge of the grid for maximum reliability, survivability,
and responsiveness.
The ECN 7650 is the first member of the ECN 7000 Series of products. The ECN
7650 supports a variety of local, wide-area, and radio frequency (RF) networks,
with up to nine antennas, all contained within the ECN 7650 enclosure to protect
them from the weather and to reduce vandalism and security risks.
An ECN 7650 device can accommodate a variety of expansion cards depending on
form factor, power requirements, and communications technology. For example,
you might design one card for RF communications and another for wired
communications.
Third-party vendors can develop ECN expansion cards for the following example
applications:
• Wide-area network (WAN) communications, for example for 2G, 3G, or
4G networks
• Metering applications, such as 868 MHz or 900 MHz transceivers for gas,
water, heat, and other metering and communications systems
• Analog or digital I/O
• Local device or network interfaces
By combining an extensible hardware architecture with the COS software
platform, the ECN 7000 Series of products provides 21
st
century management for
the smart grid.