The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 12, 2016
Filed:
Oct. 19, 2012
Nest Labs, Inc., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Anthony Michael Fadell, Portola Valley, CA (US);
Matthew Lee Rogers, Los Gatos, CA (US);
Edwin H. Satterthwaite, Jr., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Ian C. Smith, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Daniel Adam Warren, San Francisco, CA (US);
Joseph E. Palmer, San Jose, CA (US);
Shigefumi Honjo, Santa Cruz, CA (US);
Grant M. Erickson, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Jonathan Alan Dutra, Saratoga, CA (US);
Hugo Fiennes, Palo Altoa, CA (US);
Google Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
A user-friendly, network-connected learning thermostat is described. The thermostat is made up of (1) a wall-mountable backplate that includes a low-power consuming microcontroller used for activities such as polling sensors and switching on and off the HVAC functions, and (2) separable head unit that includes a higher-power consuming microprocessor, color LCD backlit display, user input devices, and wireless communications modules. The thermostat also includes a rechargeable battery and power-stealing circuitry adapted to harvest power from HVAC triggering circuits. By maintaining the microprocessor in a 'sleep' state often compared to the lower-power microcontroller, high-power consuming activities, such as learning computations, wireless network communications and interfacing with a user, can be temporarily performed by the microprocessor even though the activities use energy at a greater rate than is available from the power stealing circuitry.