External activation of quiescent device
AssigneePassiveLogic, Inc.
InventorsMarciano Carter Preciado, Sterling Thomas Sleight, Jeremy Fillingim
Life of this patent
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Abstract
After installation, a device may be not yet powered. It may be awakened by receiving a flash of light of sufficient frequency and amplitude. After waking, the device decodes the message to determine its next action, and, upon request sends an authentication message. This enables a single user action to wake the device up and set it up with networking credentials. The same process may be used to wake the device outside of a normal sleep-wake cycle.
Claims20
A quiescent electronic device configured for optical wake activation, comprising:
- a photodetection circuit configured to generate an electrical response to incident light;
- a signal conditioning path coupled to the photodetection circuit, the signal conditioning path configured to suppress steady-state illumination and to emit a discrete electrical transition in response to a rapid change in light intensity;
- a power control circuit responsive to the discrete electrical transition to couple an energy source to a processor;
- and
- a timing circuit configured to measure temporal spacing between successive discrete electrical transitions,
- wherein a plurality of temporally spaced transitions received prior to processor boot are accumulated to satisfy a wake qualification criterion, and
- wherein transitions received after satisfaction of the wake qualification criterion are temporally decoded as information symbols.
A method for externally activating and communicating with a quiescent electronic device, comprising:
- detecting incident light transitions using a photodetection circuit;
- filtering the detected incident light transitions to suppress signals lacking a minimum rate of change;
- using at least one filtered transition to enable power delivery to a processor;
- measuring time intervals between successive filtered transitions;
- accumulating a plurality of transitions occurring prior to processor readiness;
- qualifying wake activation when the accumulated plurality of transitions satisfy a predefined criterion;
- and
- after qualifying wake activation, decoding subsequent time intervals as encoded information.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.