The main purpose of IoT projects is to gather data from sensors or devices in order to gain real-time insights, accelerate decision-making, perform automated tasks, and create value by enabling organizations to become data-driven. Being data-driven allows organizations to have a significant competitive advantage, allows them to focus on the strategic and not the urgent, and builds a revenue generation stream by building applications that were unthinkable just a few years ago.
Creating applications and systems optimized for dealing with the intricacies of IoT demands a new architectural approach. In this article, I will look at three of our customers, and how they approached their IoT projects and then try to look at what the common design pattern is between these use cases. In doing so, I hope to inspire your development and successful deployment of your IoT projects.
BBOXX develops solutions to provide affordable, clean energy to off-grid communities in the developing world. BBOXX created an elegant solution — a solar-powered "Battery Box" that sits in an individual’s home to power lights and appliances like TVs, lights, and mobile phones. The name is short for “Battery Box.”
BBOXX's business is to sell energy to rural Africa. In order to grow this business, they wanted to become a data-driven company to:
I have described their use case in more detail in my article on Providing Clean Energy in Africa: An IoT Success Story, and the case study on our website has more details, but the overall technical infrastructure looks like this:
Data is sent from the sensors via a 2G network and through the Amazon Web Services infrastructure into the cloud. Once the raw sensor data is in AWS, it is then stored in InfluxDB — a database designed for metrics and events. Once in InfluxDB, they are able to analyze the data, provide interesting business dashboards, generate predictive maintenance alerts and notifications, and use this data to predict and find interesting business trends like energy consumption spikes during soccer events.
BBOXX provides hundreds of thousands of people access to clean energy across 35 countries. They are scaling their business from 85,000 units to over 1 million and have become a data-driven organization able to enter new markets and create new solutions based on data that they analyze in real-time.
tado° is a company focused on home climate control. Driven by its mission of smart energy management without sacrificing comfort, tado° believes it is possible to live comfortably and still act responsibly. Tado needed an IoT solution as it created and rolled out its Smart AC Control which enables consumers to intelligently control air conditioners based on location and temperature.
Tado's business is about using IoT to deliver an experience to the consumer that other AC controls can't do:
There are more details in the webinar and case study, but the overall technical infrastructure is:
Using the 6LoWPAN low-energy protocol, tado° devices communicate wirelessly with the company’s Internet bridge which is connected to the home router. Devices report temperature changes to the server of 0.1 degrees or more. This measurement is wrapped in a message and sent through a secure WebSocket to tado°’s cloud infrastructure which consists of EC2 instances at Amazon Web Services; from there, tado° writes the data collected to its InfluxDB Time Series Data Store. Writing to InfluxDB is done through a hosted instance in InfluxCloud, and there are 5-10 application instances writing in parallel at a total write rate of 5000 points/s. Batch writing is used, and write time for batches is observed. Netflix Hystrix adds resilience and fault tolerance, providing backup if batch write requests fail. The web applications and mobile applications query InfluxDB to provide real-time graphs, statistical analysis, and control of the AC unit.
