Onboarding

There were over 28 Billion Microcontrollers sold worldwide in 2023. Most of these MCU s were intended for connected devices called Things. The difference between regular devices powered by microcontrollers and the THING is the connectivity. THINGs are devices that are connected to the cloud where they can do data exchange, firmware updates called OTA and other functions like certificates and policies loaded to them remotely. Also users can control the THING near real time using our PaaS.

Frictionless collection of data is the core part of the AI and ML models. Faceless data is automatically harvested and can be used for business process, modeling and storage or post processing. Retention policy can be established before data collection, hence no need forexpensive persistence operations and resources.

Connection

The THINGs can connect to the cloud using several radio types.Most devices connect to an iOS and Android app via BLE and use the application access to device internet pipeline transfer data to the cloud.

Some devices connect to WiFi network and transmit data over the WiFi and HTTPS. Increasing number of devices connect and transmit data directly using LTE-M and NB - NarrowBand radio frequencies.

PlatformsIoT Platform supports all types of connections and onboards devices with one or more communication channels. Data published from devices are moved through cloud and persisted storage mechanisms and delivered to the end user in customer defined format.

Onboarding

Process of onboarding includes registering a device and connecting the device to the cloud and reading data from the device in the cloud. Based on radio type a protocol is applied for data transfer and hardware cloud access management. Once onboarded, data collection is a frictionless process.

For BLE connected devices the iOS or Android application is the owner of the connection. If needed, a modification to iOS or Android source code is done to publish data to a cloud topic. For WiFi connected devices, firmware usually is updated to publish data on cloud topics using either HTTPS or MQTT protocols.

For LTE-M and NB radio connected devices firmware is written or updated to publish data to cloud topics. Since these are true THINGS we can register, load certificates and policies on the device. For LTE-M and NB devices we have created a single click onboarding process with unit IMEI number. In all cases PlatformsIoT uses a powerful Java middle tier application to register devices, manage device groups or billing groups, define policies and load certificates to devices.

Data Collection

Regardless of connection type , the primary purpose of all things devices is to either publish data for the end user or receive commands from the end user. In the majority of the cases it is actually both. In PlatformsIoT we utilize PubSub model through cloud Topic to exchange data between the THING and end user. THING publishes to the topic and is also subscribed to a topic. End user reads the data from Topic and publishes to the Topic in a cross over pattern. Data harvesting is a fully automated and frictionless process. Faceless data is collected with a unique UUID of THING.

Temporary Storage

When data is published a PlatformsIoT lambda function in cloud service reads data and based on business logic either moves to time stampede IoT database engine like InfluxDB or to a cache or to Message Queue like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. Data can be available for AI and ML models at this stage via streaming as raw data. Data can be flown to data lakes or large data models or treated as a data lake or large data set.

Middle Tier

PlatformsIoT uses a powerful Java SpringBoot application to do post processing on data based on client business logic. Data is processed and moved to permanent storage like RDBS databases or NoSQL databases. At stage data can be post processed farther and organized in a manner required by business logic, AI or ML model. This data processing is also frictionless and faceless. Data can be entered into data lakes or large model datasets without removing sample data from raw collection.

Web Services

PlatformsIoT platform includes fully functional Web Services REST API for delivering data to end users web application, enterprise system , iOS app or Android app.

Microservices

Each client is part of PlatformsIoT microservices architecture. When a client is onboarded, the client microservice is created. The microservice has access to shared services for security, registration, AWS, GCP, AZURE clients, estimating service, QR Code generation service, maintenance service and other shared services. However , each microservice data and business logic is kept separate. In fact for each microservice we create a Java SpringBoot based Web services client with separate REST API and distinct URI for API access.

Managing Things

PlatformsIoT platform has a powerful admin interface that allows to manage things, policies, certificates, schedule an OTA for each thing or thing group or thing billing group. Our tools allow us to activate and deactivate THING s on the platform based on seasonal needs or permanently delete a thing from the network.

WE HAVE A THING

Great start. Let’s walk through the process of getting your thing onto our platform so it can be a RGU - a revenue generating unit for your organization. Contact us for the free estimate for getting your THING do whatever it does. We are a company of real engineers and we love challenges. In most cases the time to market for the product is less than 60 days from the day of first contact.

WE DO NOT HAVE A THING

We can build one for you. We have teams of real Electrical Engineers and Firmware Engineers to develop your THING from ground up based on your specs. We usually have the first PoC ready within 60 days and since we can work on software for onboarding in parallel, usually our time to market is between 60 to 120 days depending on complexity of hardware.