Comic books in the 1950s and 1960s frequently featured a dodgy advertisement touting glasses that were supposed to provide “X-ray vision.”
While such glasses never actually delivered on their promise – much to the disappointment of many a teenager! -- the introduction of ‘touch-free’ data collection and remote control via Bluetooth
SMART or other near field communications (NFC) technologies provides something like “X-ray vision” to today’s smart phone users in that they enable us to ‘see inside’ compatible embedded applications and sensors.
Here’s the general idea: Let’s say you are the manufacturer of a white appliance like a residential dishwasher. Today, such dishwashers feature several single-function electronic sensors – to monitor everything from water flow volume and temperature, to the level of outbound drain water and the drain water’s turbidity (aka: the amount of particulate matter in the wash solution). Once a dishwasher is installed in the home, however, access to these sensors in order to test their performance or replace them can be mighty troublesome.
If these same sensors were augmented with wireless functionality by the appliance manufacturer with the help of, say, a Bluetooth SMART radio (such as the new AIR module with Bluetooth SMART from Anaren), a service technician or even a consumer equipped with a suitable smart phone app might be able to pre-test the performance of such sensors without opening an equipment panel or, worse, having to disconnect and remove the entire machine.
Similarly, the digital control panels/read-outs of today’s modern dishwashers could be enhanced with wireless capability. In this scenario, the same service tech, or, again, even an appliance-savvy end customer, could use a Bluetooth SMART equipped phone or tablet app to troubleshoot an underperforming machine, upload software updates, or ‘look’ into other aspects of the machine’s performance…again, without ever having to access or unscrew the control panel.
And what’s true of a dishwasher is or soon will be also true of thousands of other kinds of household appliances, office machines, factory equipment, and field sensors: Not too long from now, we will all be able to walk within range of such wirelessly equipped devices and, with the right application on our handheld devices, we will be able to control these devices or ‘see’ all kinds of information related to their operation that we cannot easily access today.
How does a manufacturer deploy this nifty technology so customers can begin to experience and benefit from it?
There are three basic steps (greatly simplified here for the sake of brevity):
1) First, wireless functionality will need to be added to the embedded application or sensor using either an off-the-shelf, pre-packaged radio module -- or a discrete RF solution developed by the manufacturer if they have the RF expertise and infrastructure to do so. This radio (aka: transceiver, transmitter, etc.) will be required to communicate in a manner that is compliant with applicable wireless communications and electronic emissions regulations such as FCC, Industry Canada, or ETSI. It will need to interface with the onboard micro (more on that in the next step). And, needless to say, it will require some sort of reliable power source -- e.g. hard wire, battery, or energy-harvesting solution -- to power its regular or intermittent data packet transmissions to the handheld device in question.
2) The second stage of the process – essentially a software challenge -- involves converting the data generated by the embedded device or sensor into packets that can be wirelessly transmitted and received by another device…in our aforementioned scenario, a Bluetooth SMART enabled smart phone or tablet. (Developers like Austin, Texas based Emmoco can greatly simplify this stage.) Mind you, a manufacture can choose from a wide array of wireless protocols – wi-fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, ANT, etc. -- to accommodate many, and sometimes conflicting, goals such as data packet sizes, bit rates, distance, frequency of transmissions, power consumption, etc. The best protocol choice for you depends on your objectives for going wireless in the first place.
3) Once received by the end-device, the transmitted data will need to be viewed or accessed by user – in this case, on a smart phone or tablet. This is accomplished through the development of a user interface or “app,” not at all unlike those we all use in our daily lives. As such, all the classic questions (and marketing potential) of user interfaces will come into play, i.e.: Do you a simple, no-frills window to open up and show a log of the data packets arriving? Do you want the data to then upload or synch to the cloud for analysis or archiving purposes? Do you want to provide a fully branded user experience, where the ‘app’ becomes a way to constantly communicate with and add value for the customer? Again, the look, feel, and complexity of your solution will stem from your business and technology goals.