Customer Background
Our customer is a US-based leading manufacturer of engineered water solutions serving the commercial, municipal, and industrial markets. Their 100+ years of experience translates to sustainable, high-performance water solutions that help customers save the earth’s most precious resource.
Customer Need
Most building systems (like plumbing, irrigation systems, public restrooms, etc.) rely greatly on water, and hence, water management is a very high priority. A water-efficiency-focused system ensures the future availability of resources and gives the organisation a reputation of an environment-friendly enterprise while also saving on energy costs. Our customer’s need to balance smart building functionality with water conservation raised a critical question — to better control and monitor water usage, why not integrate water management systems into the centralised building management system?
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel engaged with the customer to ideate, conceptualise, and validate technology concepts for gaining a thorough understanding of their business needs – the outcome led to identifying a building gateway solution that would address the customer’s challenge. Softdel then commenced the development of the hardware and software based gateway solution.
- The gateway solution communicates with LoRA-based faucets and valves and exposes them to the building management system (BMS) over BACnet to enhance interoperability.
- This virtual, centralised platform monitors and controls the entire water management eco-system for the customer, passing essential parameters (like activations, last usage, water volume, etc.) to the BMS for increased efficiency.
- Post gateway development, Softdel also helped the customer through the BACnet certification process.
Standards and Technology
ASHRAE Standard 135-2016: BACnet (PR-19)
Technology: LoRa Wireless RF technology Sub 1 GHz
SOM: Colibri iMX7
Front End: HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX
Back End: C, Python-Flask
Database: SQLite
Operating System: Linux version 2.8 (yocto) 32 Bit Architecture on A7 core | FreeRTOS on M4 core
Simulating Tool: BOSS (Softdel’s BACnet Simulator), Yabe
Benefits
- Efficient water usage: An expanded ability to manage and monitor water usage improved energy and cost-efficiency, leading to resource conservation.
- Ease of use: A user-friendly configuration utility allowed ease of gateway installation and navigation.
- Up-to-date standards: Using the latest BACnet communication protocol, the customer was able to achieve higher interconnectivity with devices and systems.
- Easy Scalability: Softdel's gateway solution allows the customer to easily integrate with other subsystems, thus accommodating the increasing industry-wide acceptance of LoRA technology.
