IoT Data Starter Kit

Creating a better data collection system for smart manufacturing comes with its own set of challenges. Making it easy to use while setting up quickly, showing plant managers how well it works, and installing it seamlessly so that production disruption is minimized, are the first big demands. Handling lots of real-time data is tough, and it’s needed to make sure operators can see how well machines are doing. Interoperability and matching the system to different plant needs while keeping things consistent is another challenge. Lastly, effective data visualization techniques must be developed to extract actionable, optimized, insights. Successfully addressing these challenges will pave the way for an efficient and insightful data collection and analysis system.

At the request of a U.S.-based manufacturing company, we designed and created a non-invasive data starter kit that is user-friendly and easy to deploy. This kit was supported by different reliable sensors (measuring vibration, temperature, current, and a lot of other important metrics), and an edge gateway to transfer collected data from these sensors to the cloud infrastructure where we visualized them in dashboards and used for further analysis like preventive maintenance. Sensors in this kit were designed to attach to the running machines in a few minutes and started data collection without any interruption to the production line resulting in undesirable downtimes. High-volume collected sensory data was then sent to the edge gateway and pre-processed before being transmitted to the could data storage through cellular connectivity. 

As a result of this effort, we deployed more than fifty number of these kits in different factory plants. Managers and decision-makers utilized the provided data in dashboards to better analyze the production line and improve the overall performance of shop floors and their production lines.