Australian firm GreaseBoss has launched a circulation meter designed to make sure acceptable equipment and gear upkeep in manufacturing, mining, and utility functions. The ‘GreaseBoss Endpoint’ sensor is positioned consistent with grease factors on equipment to watch the circulation of industrial lubricant. This helps firms remotely monitor their gear, making certain grease is being utilized evenly and figuring out any auto-lubricator reservoirs that require refilling. Adequate lubrication is essential for these functions, as elevated friction can improve the quantity of required upkeep and shorten the lifetime of apparatus. Unplanned downtime of apparatus may be costly, making predictive upkeep extremely helpful.
Edge processing advantages
“The GreaseBoss system focuses on empowering small groups to remotely handle the greasing of large fleets of equipment amongst different duties of their day by day workflow,” stated Peter Condoleon, CTO and co-founder of GreaseBoss.
GreaseBoss Endpoint integrates Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52833 SoC for knowledge assortment and sensor interface administration, earlier than relaying key metrics to a GreaseBoss gateway utilizing its Bluetooth low power (LE) connectivity. The nRF52833 SoC’s 64 MHz, 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor with floating level unit (FPU) employs edge processing to pick and ship solely the related data, avoiding pointless knowledge transmission and conserving energy.
From the gateway, the important thing knowledge is relayed to the cloud, from the place it may be accessed and analysed by customers. Each automated and on-demand reviews can be found from the ‘GreaseBoss Cloud’ internet platform, permitting firms to verify whether or not they’re assembly their pre-set lubrication necessities and obtain alerts if any areas of non-compliance are detected. Customers can even configure the plant construction arrange from the net platform.
This technique is constructed utilizing Nordic resolution companion Memfault’s IoT reliability platform for embedded observability, distant debugging, and over-the-air (OTA) fleet administration. Memfault supplies capabilities akin to metric, reboot, and hint reporting together with efficiency benchmarking to make sure the reliability of the GreaseBoss Endpoint sensors.
By leveraging Memfault, GreaseBoss Endpoint reduces the necessity for pointless on-site visits and {hardware} returns to debug points. It additionally helps customers improve the uptime and reliability of their belongings. With Memfault additionally used on its units in improvement, GreaseBoss performs high quality evaluation and ensures every system meets the required requirements earlier than transport.
Decreased energy consumption
“To make GreaseBoss doable, our sensors wanted to have the longest doable life whereas in harsh industrial environments with excessive temperatures and many RF obstacles,” stated Condoleon. “The nRF52833 SoC hits the candy spot with its ultra-low energy consumption, prolonged working temperature vary from -40 to 105˚C and max transmit energy of +8 dBm. The extensive enter voltage vary additionally helped simplify the design and take away pointless elements from the invoice of supplies (BOM) by powering the chip instantly off the replaceable coin cell battery.”
Because of the massive variety of sensors required, and their usually hazardous or hard-to-reach placement, reaching an extended battery life was key to this utility. The GreaseBoss Endpoint achieved this, partly as a result of energy-efficient nature of the nRF52833 SoC and the efficiency monitoring capabilities of Memfault. GreaseBoss additionally used the Nordic Energy Profiler Equipment II (PPK2) to run numerous energy consumption eventualities to make sure that the units can repeatedly perform for a number of years.
“The nice group, help, and improvement instruments had been key drivers in selecting a Nordic resolution,” continued Condoleon. “We used the nRF Join SDK to construct our utility solely in-house – in actual fact, we had been in a position to make use of the SDK to prototype components of our utility in a matter of days and develop a field-ready beta [solution] in weeks. The abundance of pattern code made it simple to get began, and we discovered the documentation simple to navigate and useful as we began to optimise for energy and efficiency.”
