How to speed up the go-to-market of your IoT solution? With our wireless mesh!
Honesty is the best policy. We would love to say that our wireless mesh technology is perfect for everyone. But we know that’s up to the customer. Focusing on what we are best at, we provide a powerful Wirepas Massive development environment and then we pass on the responsibility to the customer.
Wirepas itself does not provide an end-to-end solution – we want to expose our ecosystem to new partners. And this way, we can concentrate on the wireless technology in the form of a software development kit (SDK), called the Wirepas Massive. Wirepas Massive is applicable in various types of use cases. Each use case requires a unique application which is developed by the customer itself or a Wirepas partner. Of course, the benefit of the business model is flexibility and final solutions that are fit for purpose. As the following shows.
Example case – Sulzer
Our tech reaches far and wide. Products innovated and delivered by Wirepas customers vary from lighting to asset tracking, and from vertical solutions to more horizontal entities. A great recent example of an innovative customer is Sulzer, a Swiss company, that required a reliable wireless system to monitor its pump system.
The sensors installed in the pumps need to communicate with each other and monitor system temperature and vibration data. The customer had ruled out Bluetooth or a mobile operator as a solution, and instead found Wirepas Maaive to be the optimal solution for Sulzer in the industrial environment. A global leading pump company, a global product idea, the required technical solution and expertise – everything was available through the open Wirepas ecosystem. Sulzer was introduced to many Wirepas ecosystem partners who have already successfully delivered complex projects. The complete implementation was done by Wirepas ecosystem partner Treon, whereas Wirepas took care of the connectivity.
Customers get to develop their specialized solutions. On their terms.
Applications like preventive maintenance typically require dedicated sensors, such as vibration and temperature sensors. Then, depending on the use case, sensors measure with various intervals. The application also contains the business logic, defined by the customer, to react and send e.g. an alarm to the end user through the network and cloud. So, in the best possible way and for the best possible results, Wirepas leaves the responsibility of the implementation of the application to the customer.
The final customer device is built to include Wirepas Massive compatible hardware components which are off-the-shelf 2.4 GHz radio components. The customer can source the hardware through the ideal channel already known to them, either directly from a device manufacturer or through a distributor.
Getting down to the details
It’s all about putting the customer in control. Quickly and easily. Thanks to the state-of-the-art performance optimization in power consumption and throughput, Wirepas delivery does not need to include an operating system (OS). Customers can implement the application to run on the Wirepas software on the same radio hardware. Usually, this is the most common scenario due to the optimization of the hardware cost. But if the customer prefers to use an OS, because of legacy or a strategic company decision, it is easy to run the operating system with customer application on a separate microprocessor, for example the STm32. Then the customer can use the Wirepas Massive through the software API over the UART serial communication. This way, the customer can run their application on the same radio chip, without needing a separate processor to run the application code. A tidy solution that also lowers the overall cost.
This is what it means
Wirepas supports off-the-shelf components, like Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 or SiLabs EFR32 radio components or modules.
Wirepas Massive software with customer application software can be flashed to the hardware with standard flashing tools.
A unique ID and network parameters are given to the flashed devices, which can then be connected to the gateway for testing purposes.
Wirepas also provides a powerful Network Monitoring tool, which shows the diagnostic data and the topology of the network under testing.
Here’s another powerful thing – the gateway to cloud reference implementation which is available in Wirepas GitHub as opensource. Many of Wirepas customers have taken the reference implementation, loaded it to a Raspberry PI hardware and had data flowing in a day.
Wirepas customers can modify their applications based on a reference application, which comes with the SDK. They have full latitude to add any sensors on the hardware, do edge computing or traditional application logic before transmitting the data. When the data is transmitted, the application does not need to care about routing or reliability, because that is Wirepas’ responsibility.
This is the bottom line
Through the ecosystem partners, Wirepas enables a fast go-to-market for their customers with new products. It can be a case of a new generation of a product using wired data transfer or a totally new solution that could not even be developed without Wirepas Massive.
If you’re an embedded software or hardware designer who has read this far, then you probably have more questions than before you started reading. Don’t worry. Get them answered by visiting https://github.com/wirepas.
