The Internet of Things conference held at Munich, Germany featured many topics related to the development and design of applications, services and devices for the Internet of Things and of course our special interest topic: Zephyr RTOS.
Themed largely around artificial intelligence in the IoT, security, open source, AI ethics and law attendees heard from experts that have been in the sector for years.
Oliver Völckers, Founder and Managing Director at BeST Berliner Sensortechnik GmbH, gave a talk on “Development of a robust IoT system for monitoring sewage pumps with pattern recognition.” The whys and wherefores of this project is based on the challenges faced by his customer DB (Deutsche Bahn) in their ICE Trains.
About the Project
To ensure the proper function of restrooms in ICE trains, wastewater tanks must be emptied on a regular basis. It is very important to ensure that the tanks are completely emptied and that they do not become clogged, since the restrooms may otherwise need to be closed or the train might even need to be canceled for maintenance.
Deutsche Bahn conducted a pilot project involving 36 BeST Sensor pump monitoring systems in Intercity Express (ICE) trains across four German sites. The ‘BeST Sensor Pump Monitor JROV2201’ developed in conjunction with Phytec, based on Zephyr RTOS, powered by Nordic’s nRF9160 SIP tracks wastewater pump usage and provides a real-time overview of the status of all connected pumps, as well as an automatic compilation of all flow events. Read more about the product here.
The key takeaways of Oliver’s tech talk was:
1. How to design a battery powered device with integrated pattern recognition and reporting of malfunctions.
2. Signal processing and minimal energy consumption
3. Stability of hardware and software
4. Technical and organizational difficulties faced by the team
According to Oliver, many of the attendees were appreciative about how this project is helping many rail commuters to have a comfortable and enjoyable ride. At the same time, from a technical point of view he added that many still are not aware of the endless possibilities of the Zephyr RTOS. A feature-rich software optimized for memory constrained devices and can run on systems with as little as 8 kB of memory that can scale up to systems with megabytes or even gigabytes of memory due to its support for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures; some even think that the fact that nRF9160 and Zephyr could run for months on a battery charge sounded too good to be real.”
For sure, we now know that many of the attendees learned about Zephyr and left with mind boggling questions, ideas and possibilities.
Learn more about the benefits of using Zephyr in your application. If you have questions or would like to chat with any of our Zephyr ambassadors or members of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), please join us on Discord.