XBee-Enabled Sensors Monitor Harsh Environments

Time is essential when it comes to introducing new products to the market. Many clients need to mass manufacture a product in a very short time. Their requirements put Foxconn under substantial pressure.

RMONI was facing temperature monitoring challenges in a cold chain business. A cold chain must be established and maintained to ensure goods have been properly refrigerated during every step of the process, making temperature monitoring a critical business function. Manual registration practice can be very costly, labor intensive and prone to mistakes.

Zadi Group wanted to make innovative technologies one of its main differentiators. They are planning on moving away from the old legacy client server systems to a solution in the cloud.

Schneider Electric Le Vaudreuil factory in France is recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the world’s top nine most advanced “lighthouse” sites, applying Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at large scale. It was experiencing machine-health and unplanned downtime issues on a critical machine within their manufacturing process. They were looking for a solution that could easily leverage existing machine data feeds, be used by machine operators without requiring complex setup or extensive training, and with a fast return on investment.

Schneider Electric required a cloud solution for its energy management platform to manage high computational operations, which were essential for catering to client requirements. As the business involves storage and analysis of huge amounts of data, the company also needed a convenient and scalable storage solution to facilitate operations efficiently.

Many large manufacturers in and outside Japan are competing for larger market share in the same space, expecting a growing demand for projectors in the areas of entertainment, which requires glamor and strong visual performance as well as digital signage that can attract people’s attention. “It is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate ourselves with stand-alone hardware products,” says Kazuyuki Kitagawa, Director of Service & Support at Panasonic AVC Networks. “In order for Panasonic to grow market share and overall business, it is essential for us to develop solutions that deliver significant added value.” Panasonic believes projection failure and quality deterioration should never happen. This is what and has driven them to make their projectors IoT-enabled. More specifically, Panasonic has developed a system that collects data from projectors, visualizes detailed operational statuses, and predicts issues and address them before failure occurs. Their projectors are embedded with a variety of sensors that measure power supply, voltage, video input/ output signals, intake/exhaust air temperatures, cooling fan operations, and light bulb operating time. These sensors have been used to make the projector more intelligent, automatically suspending operation when the temperature rises excessively, and automatically switching light bulbs. Although this was a great first step, Panasonic projectors were still not equipped with any capability to send the data over a network.