Customer Background
This renowned US-based customer manufactures safety products for diverse industries like construction, mining, oil & gas, fire services, and even the military. For over 100 years, their fall protection devices, portable gas detection instruments, breathing apparatus, and many others have been safeguarding human lives and infrastructure, making them global leaders in the safety products manufacturing industry.
Customer Need
Flame detectors are one of the many safety products manufactured by the customer. However, the risk involved in close-quarter configuration of these devices was too high, as were the maintenance costs and manpower involved. As a part of their IoT and digitisation initiative, the customer needed to integrate a Bluetooth interface on their flame detectors and design an app that allowed the customer to monitor and control all these devices. They partnered with Softdel to develop a solution matching their exact needs.
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel engineered a highly configurable Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) interface for the customer's flame detectors, which were equipped with:
- Device discovery and pairing support using the Generic Access Profile (GAP) and Generic Attribute Profile (GATT)
- Enhanced security and data encryption, with an exclusive pairing ability for products from the customer’s product line
- Push monitor data upon request from the mobile application
- Ability to receive control commands from the mobile application using BLE Profiles/Services, and perform various control and monitoring operations
- A test case framework, which was created using the VectorCAST testing tool
- Softdel also developed a cross-platform (Android and iOS) BLE Mobile Application, complete with a user-friendly UI/UX, using the Xamarin framework. The app’s functionalities included:
- Active as well as passive remote monitoring ability
- Device communication solely with customer’s products, to maintain a secure network
- Data collection over Bluetooth
- Data visualisation with an auto-refresh feature
- Ability to download event logs up to 7500 events, and store these in .csv format
- Modbus and HART configuration
- Access as per user roles, like regular and admin, safety manager, and so on
Standards and Technology
Communication Protocols: BLE 5.0, HART
Framework: Xamarin
Platform: Android and iOS
Database: SQLite
Tool: Visual Studio, Code Composer Studio, SEGGER Embedded Studio
Operating Systems: TI-RTOS
Benefits
- Cost efficiency: The solution was developed without increasing energy usage or overhead cost, which subsequently reduced hardware dependency and maintenance expenditure.
- Higher degree of flexibility: The mobile application brings data to the customer's fingertips and allows them to connect with multiple devices at once, from anywhere.
- Enhanced safety measures: A fail-safe algorithm restricts connectivity to the customer's product line ensuring the flame detectors work inside a highly secured and encrypted network.
- Competitive advantage: Softdel's engineered solution, which 'far exceeded expectations’, according to the customer, brought IoT connectivity to their flame detectors, giving them an added advantage in the safety products market.
