IoT, Industry 4.0 solutions on parade at embedded world

Experts from the company, which has specialised in the areas of sensor technology and communication mainly for the last four-and-a-half decades, are demonstrating all necessary process steps, starting from the selection of suitable sensors to store measurement data onto an optimised IT structure for each individual application case including the necessary hardware.

In order to illustrate the individual steps better, data collected by various sensors are firstly sent to data collectors and gateways by different short-distance communication networks such as EnOcean, XBee (Zigbee/802.15.4/Digimesh), Bluetooth Low Energy or Wifi. They communicate with a server backbone which processes the sensor data provided to the exhibition booth and transmits the values live into the Internet.

What at first perhaps does not appear to complicate mostly proves to be anything but trivial when put into practice. The ideal sensor for a particular application can be found by intensive study of factors such as control, calibration, lifetime, disturbing influences, evaluation of the measurement data acquired, energy consumption and maintenance of this particular sensor technology. The same is valid for most suitable wireless technology for the respective application.

At first a number of questions regarding coverage requirements, data rates, country-specific regulations, network topologies, energy consumption, etc. must be answered, and a large number of issues concerning infrastructure, data transmission rates, data volumes, security, firewalls, routing, interfaces and presentation of the data must be borne in mind when selecting the most suitable data collectors and gateways to communicate with the backbone or the cloud.

The IoT and Industry 4.0 example presented by Unitronic at the embedded world are therefore the result of unique system solution competence built up over many years in the area of sensor technology and M2M communication. It is purely thanks to their technology, product and development expertise of sensor- and communication technology that the company is in a position to react quickly and individually to a wide variety of customer requirements. This ranges from classical consulting services and qualified design-in support to the complete design and development of complex applications and the provision of a highly efficient M2M infrastructure.