Taiwanese firm Advantech partnered Sweden-based Trell Technologies to develop a LoRaWan-based system that lets building owners monitor key elements during the five-year new building warranty period and beyond.
 
The initial brief was to provide a system for monitoring temperature, humidity and external doors remotely in a residential building in Sweden during the five-year warranty period applicable to all new buildings of this type. Advantech and Trell Technologies engaged with the customer at the early stages, working with the building owner to identity the most effective way in which to provide technology that could be scaled up and expanded on in the future, for example, by implementing additional utility monitoring and functionality.
 
The system Advantech created is agnostic to sensor vendor, allowing users to test various different sensors, resulting in flexibility and extensibility for various building types. Temperature and humidity sensing are implemented via Advantech Edge intelligent gateways, which provide a local, private LoRaWan and backhaul data over cellular connection to the cloud.
 
In this project, sensing nodes were also sourced from third parties providing commercially available consumer grade LoRaWan sensors, selected by the user based on aesthetics. All sensors were integrated into the hardware implemented by Advantech. This flexibility was imperative as multiple sensors were connected in each apartment, so maintaining the look and feel of the sensors was as important as functionality.
 
Door monitors were wired locally to the physical lock, providing updates on four possible statuses – open, closed, locked and unlocked. This information is gathered via an Advantech IO module that feeds back to the data repository on a state-of-change basis, removing unnecessary data updates.
 
This proof of concept implementation uses Advantech’s Wise PaaS cloud platform, however there is no lock-in, and for this application there are plans to migrate to the user’s own Microsoft Azure cloud service. This is possible as the Advantech software blocks can sit anywhere based on the needs of each project.
 
“This application just highlights how technology can deliver smart buildings that are more efficient and maintainable for the building owner as well as providing peace of mind and a comfortable place to live for residents,” said Bobby Vale, head of Advantech IoT platforms and ecosystem.
 
Advantech’s embedded IoT group not only delivers embedded design-in services but also develops a series of integrated IoT products and services to assist users approaching the IoT market by reducing uncertainty and risk.
 
Advantech specialises in IoT intelligent systems and embedded platforms. To embrace the trends of IoT, big data and artificial intelligence, it promotes IoT hardware and software with the edge intelligence Wise-PaaS core to assist businesses and clients in connecting their industrial chains.