Low power IoT design challenge:- Blog 1 : Omya package health monitor

Hello all,

        It's been quite a while I had received the hardware and I was going through a lot of documentation and figuring my way out to get the required things to be done,

before starting the project, i.e basically what we call housekeeping stuff. Installed Modus toolbox and figured architecture of the project and planned what to do and how to run the device

on the battery for a longer duration and all. After brainstorming for a while to make a predictive maintenance device that can be deployed on an industrial motor or moving machine to predict

the failure I felt why can't use the existing AC powerline and generate the required DC power. This will make my system line powered and there won't be any meaning to my system if it runs on mains voltage.

My logic was if I can use AC power there won't be any meaning to the Low Power IoT design challenge.

         The main idea here is to run on the edge with a battery for a longer duration, like months.

But the idea that I had mentioned in the application would make sense only in the case of industrial machines that run on diesel or in outdoor environments like construction/ oil mills etc.

          So I was going through other issues which need to be addressed beforehand than these issues. The one that caught my eye was the recent issue of transporting essentials and medical supplies like

covid-19 vaccine etc. There are a lot of mishandling of these fragile goods and especially in the case of medicines/foods or the things which are fragile and consumed by a human being.

Consider a scenario where a cold storage facility in a vehicle breaks down and vaccines kept inside are totally wasted but in the fear of missing out on the next contract the transport authority won't inform this

catastrophe to the hospital or the vaccine centre, this results in people receiving the ineffective or vaccine with side effects.

        Using the power of edge computing and embedded machine learning we can detect the various parameters such as the health index of the package which can help us to provide the assurance of the quality

of the product being delivered by the logistics company. So I call this project Omya where I will be using sensors and low power IoT device PSoC 6 device to measure and account for the health of the package throughout

the journey from the production to final delivery.  Omya in Sanskrit stands for "to protect", which here refers to protecting the package health. I feel this is a worthwhile use of Low power feature of the PSoC device as this

application needs to run on battery as it will be embedded in the container of the package itself. For example, in the case of vaccine the container box holding let's say 100 vaccine vials will have this embedded device

attached to running on a coin cell or a lithium-ion battery.

Here's the architecture I have decided on for this purpose:

The main brain here will be the PSoC MCU and sensors would be a hall effect sensor Infineon TLV-493D and an IMU sensor along with a temperature sensor

The controller will log all the data onto the device like flash or a micro sd card and will send them to the cloud when there is a wifi connectivity. This happens when it reaches from warehouse to warehouse and

finally at the delivery place. Once the network of these intelligent devices is mature enough this will be like airbags.