Temperature, moisture, accelerometer, orientation and pressure sensors to monitor the status of the wastewater tanks

German railway operator, Deutsche Bahn, undertook a pilot project using 36 BeST Sensor pump monitoring systems in Intercity Express (ICE) trains across four sites in Germany. The BeST SENSOR Pump Monitor JROV2201, developed in conjunction with Phytec, devices use temperature, moisture, accelerometer, orientation and pressure sensors to monitor the status of the wastewater tanks.

Powered by Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP cellular IoT solution, an integrated pattern recognition system detects any issues with the tank. The SiP’s powerful 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor analyses the disposal flow. By using a streamlined machine learning (ML) algorithm, decisions are made on-chip about what data is important enough to transmit, cutting data costs and improving power consumption.

From a software perspective, the SiP provides a real-time operating system (Zephyr RTOS) with multi-tasking, extensive support with driver software for additional components such as sensors and LEDs, and open source components. The development environment is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Oliver VölckersCo-Founder of BeST SENSOR