Amidst South Africa’s energy challenges, Fluss has developed an IoT device to monitor backup supply for retailers, overcoming hurdles like diverse hardware setups and tricky environments. Ensuring seamless communication using various networks, their cloud platform offers real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and custom reports, empowering businesses to optimise operations.
“The first challenge in developing the device was integrating with multiple third-party hardware setups, understanding the different protocols and making sense of the data gathered – all this achieved on a low-cost microcontroller and custom-built circuit board,” explains the founder of Fluss, Thomas Davies. “The next challenge we faced was the location of the actual hardware; in most instances, deep underground or surrounded by concrete, which meant getting signals out of any kind was problematic. In certain areas, networks such as SigFox and some commercial LoraWan networks were available, but not in others.”
“The final scope includes over 1000 IoT devices that can plug in multiple different communication modules, including SigFox, NB-Iot, LTE, LoraWan or Wi-Fi, depending on what is available in that part of the city, or in that particular part of the country.”
The final challenge was commissioning, setting up, and deploying the device at scale across the country using multiple communication technologies simultaneously. The Fluss cloud-based backend ingests data from multiple sources across various networks, stores the data securely, and can initiate action based on any conditions represented in the data.
“By providing real-time power monitoring and state of health of backup systems, organisations can centralise their operations and gain insight into their businesses,” explains Davies. “We have successfully developed a multi-tenanted cloud-based web platform for the data that allows our customers to monitor energy consumption in real-time, identify inefficiencies, detect anomalies, and implement timely interventions to ensure data integrity and protection of their hardware. The application provides real-time alerts, regular automated reporting and customisable reports that can be generated on the fly.”
Fluss continues to grow its capacity to provide turnkey IoT solutions for customers large and small worldwide, with a particular focus on rapid custom hardware and software development, straightforward deployment and device management, simple integration with existing hardware and software, and customisable reporting.
For more information, contact Fluss Technologies,
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