How Arcomat Monitored Performance and Improved Security for Outdoor Digital Screens

Sierra Wireless’ FX30S device is designed to collect and transmit detailed IoT data from a range of different interfaces, allowing it to track how individual components and pieces of equipment are performing. It is small, rugged and durable, which makes it perfect for urban information displays that are frequently situated outside and are subject to the elements. The FX30S device is also built for low power consumption – under 1W in idle mode and less than 2 milliwatts (mW) in ultra-low power mode, which extends the battery lifetime for urban displays running on battery with solar panels.

In addition, Sierra’s Octave^™ data orchestration platform has been integrated with the KHEIRON IoT suite from IoThink.

Interoperable, user-friendly, and multi-tenant, the KHEIRON platform allows Arcomat users to visualize in real time the data coming from the FX30S Octave devices, to quickly analyze it and, whenever necessary, to export it. The dashboard has been customized according to Arcomat needs and is used to display the following information: operating time, battery status, number of posters as well as the number of panel faults, thanks to the charts and the events chronology table.

Hosted on Microsoft Azure when used in SaaS mode, which makes it perfectly scalable, IoThink Solutions’ platform, KHEIRON, can address any type of IoT project, from the connection of a few sensors to the deployment of bigger projects with a high volume of devices, through a simple cloud API to Octave^TM data orchestration platform.

Edge-to-cloud solution

Octave is an end-to-end solution. It provides edge devices to extract data from the Arcomat equipment, and also cellular connectivity and distributed processing engines that securely transmit sensor data over low-power cellular networks to the KHEIRON IoT suite. Engineers at IoThink did not have to build an IoT infrastructure from scratch; instead, they were able to rely on Octave and focus on what matters most – the data from Arcomat equipment. 

Simplifying data extraction  

Arcomat’s equipment supports Modbus, a standard industrial protocol, making the process of extracting and processing data straightforward with Octave, such as number of ads inside the billboard, current display status or default code. Modbus is popular for enabling communications between programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and other industrial equipment, and is one of the protocols supported for connecting to your asset in Octave. 

Octave’s Modbus feature does not perform any built-in data manipulation. Instead, customers can use the Octave interface to configure the Modbus registers based on the exact needs of the customer’s equipment. This includes defining the polling frequency, and using either edge actions or cloud actions to manipulate register values as required.

Simplifying cloud connection    

A key feature of Octave is its interoperability with external, third-party cloud systems to both send and receive information. There are different ways to programmatically set up communications between Octave and these cloud systems. One example is to send data from Octave by invoking third-party Rest APIs through cloud actions. Alternatively, a company could use a cloud connector such as HTTP or IoT Hub to link to Microsoft Azure. This is the approach that has been used by IoThink to send data from Octave to KHEIRON, which is hosted on Azure.

Pushing changes from the cloud to the edge  

Octave offers the flexibility to easily customize and update Arcomat’s remote monitoring application. KHEIRON can push commands, configuration parameters and edge action code through Octave to instantly change the settings and the mission profile of the controllers in the urban display units.

Simplifying connectivity and minimizing data consumption  

Because Octave comes with built-in connectivity, it can dynamically select and automatically connect to the best available cellular network from 600-plus partner networks in more than 190 countries. Further, by using Octave to process data at the edge, IoThink needs to only send relevant information to the cloud, which reduces the overall data consumption of the IoT application.