IoT solution for lifestyle appliance

With its proven expertise in the IoT market, Faststream Technologies was approached to help a control system & equipment design and manufacturing company to deliver complete IoT solutions for their lifestyle appliance. In this modern 21st century technology enable that appliance environment in remotely located computer communication systems and control assemblies and software connected by a standard Internet connection and capable of bilateral transfer and interpretation of status files. Also presented herein are business processes of remotely managing, monitoring, and/or controlling the environmental parameters of appliance environments using electronic control systems installed in the appliance in combination with a remotely located control system, wherein the two systems are in communication through an Internet connection.

Lifestyle appliance IoT controller features include:

Remote monitoring of the health of the appliance
Access to the information by the homeowner, dealer, technician.
Create appliance models with the associated devices
Error codes, fault logs accessible remotely.
Connection Information.
Usage Information.
New apps for homeowner, dealer, technician
New Smart device Apps for Home Owner (Android and iOS)
New Status Information
Logs, Events.

IoT Gateway

i.MX6UL ARM Cortex-A7 @ 696 MHz based IoT gateway is used which connects the appliance controller to cloud, web application, and mobile application (iOS and Android).
IoT gateway running on customized Linux OS and Java runtime environment.
Gateway connectivity through Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Protocols used for communication with appliance controller and the cloud using RS485 data bus and MQTT mosquito broker
Updated Wi-Fi radio technology
- 1. Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n
WLAN Maximum Output Power 18dBm (Typ)
Includes an RJ45 Ethernet Port for hardwire installation alternative
Wireless Connectivity via web access
Push Firmware Updates
User can provision the IoT Gateway using mobile applications (iOS and Android) and the application has all the controls and settings option to control the appliance controller packs
Over the Air, Software can be updated on the IoT gateway via the cloud server if a new version of the software is available on the server.

Appliance Controller

It controls all the events by receiving user commands via the IoT gateway and appliance UI touch panel using a cloud environment.

Appliance Panel

It is a UI device and connected to both the IoT gateway and controller via an RS485 data bus.
Using this device user can perform all the events in the controller.
It is used to send and receives messages/ acknowledgment to the IoT gateway and controller.
Also updates the current status of the appliance, so that user can see their appliance status in UI.

Appliance Controller events through web portal access:

Website access provides for the homeowner, dealer, technician.
Perform remote diagnostics on the appliance from the website.
Ability to understand the problem before rolling the technician.
Remote Access to technical commands.
User type defines access & information available
Alerts and Online Status Notifications sent to Home Owner, Technician, Dealer.

Appliance Control through Mobility Application:

Connecting the appliance controller using two variant mobile applications (i.e. Android and iOS) platforms using gateway and internet. When the user not physically present near the appliance panel at that time this mobile application access useful to control the system.

Technology Expertise:

Shell scripting is used to control all the hardware units and java agent is running for all the Backend Events within the embedded Linux operating system Interface. A custom JAVA KVM has been designed to decode and encode RS-485 messages using WBG API, and communications with the messaging server via MQTT. The Mongo DB is the central storage location for all application and appliance data.