GPS World

Tag: telemetry

  • AirLink GX450 from Sierra Wireless now supports advanced vehicle telemetry

    Sierra Wireless has released an advanced fleet management feature to support the company’s AirLink GX450 mobile gateway, allowing it to collect OBD-II vehicle telemetry data.

    The added functionality will enable large organizations and fleet management solution providers to rapidly develop applications to monitor vehicle health and performance, helping them reduce costs, streamline operations and increase efficiency.

    Managing a vehicle-based workforce involves a large group of stakeholders, including operations, IT and fleet management. By combining mobile networking and rich vehicle telematics onto a single platform that gathers and reports vehicle diagnostic data directly to applications, this new feature will simplify and centralize vehicle management across an organization. Organizations will no longer need to purchase a separate in-vehicle telematics platform to gather and monitor vehicle health data.

    “We added advanced, easy-to-use telemetry to the AirLink GX450 to enable customers to simplify the adoption of vehicle telemetry solutions, including the ability to leverage their existing investment in fleet communications equipment,” said Jason Krause, senior vice president, Enterprise Solutions, Sierra Wireless.

    Clevest, a provider of mobile workforce management solutions for utilities, has worked closely with Sierra Wireless through the development of the AirLink GX450’s vehicle telemetry feature to produce a complete workforce management and vehicle monitoring solution.

    “Our mobile workforce platform is tightly integrated with AirLink gateways,” said Edna Menon, senior product marketing manager, Clevest. “With the GX450 telemetry feature, our utility customers can take advantage of robust vehicle diagnostic capabilities, in addition to the reliability and ease-of-use of our integrated solutions.”

    The AirLink GX450 vehicle telemetry uses an optional OBD-II accessory to collect vehicle diagnostic data and send it to a remote server using an open messaging protocol (MQTT). Vehicle telemetry is designed for applications in public safety, utilities, emergency and field services, and for large organizations or fleet management solution providers that have the in-house resources to develop their own vehicle monitoring applications.

  • Buddy Launches Platform to Access Connected Device Data

    Buddy Platform, Inc., has launched its new platform that hosts and manages data generated by any connected device, enabling measurement of a device from the moment it’s turned on throughout its entire lifecycle. This data, often referred to as “telemetry data,” conveys information about the performance and usage of the device, and is now accessible from any common BI tool.

    Buddy helps answer the question, “How is this device being used?” and “Is it performing like we designed it to?”. Buddy is live with customers in industries such as aviation, automotive (connected cars), retail, connected home, consumer electronics and embedded silicon.

    While most connected or “Internet of Things” devices have functionality to enable control or monitoring (such as from a mobile app), relatively few are making performance and usage data accessible for analysis. By giving product management, engineering and support teams access to this data, and the insights that are derived from it, organizations can dramatically increase their ability to build better products and support the customers of these products in-market.

    “Now that devices as varied as door locks, light bulbs, kiosks and cars are all becoming connected, there’s a huge amount of data that can give manufacturers exactly the information they need to support and improve their products,” said David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy Platform. “Device manufacturers are not cloud infrastructure companies. They’ve built technology into their products to control the device, but haven’t built the infrastructure to access and use the device’s telemetry data to improve the product and delight customers. Buddy makes it fast and easy to access those insights and immediately understand more deeply how customers are using these kinds of IoT devices.”

    Adding to the challenge is that the regulatory environment for data storage is becoming more complex. Various countries are enacting legislation that specifies how and where personal data may be stored.

    Buddy works by hosting a series of regionally sandboxed, global BuddyAPI endpoints to which devices can send their raw telemetry data. This data is pushed into a secure storage infrastructure called BuddyVault, whereupon it is then managed, queried and exposed back to the customer in any form they wish with BuddyView. This may take the form of integrations into common business intelligence tools, or as raw APIs that can be plugged into any customer or M2M scenario.

    With the addition of a few lines of code, the Buddy Platform offers a low overhead solution for extracting telemetry data from a device, and can make an unprecedented amount of device performance data broadly accessible to an organization, including:

    • How is this device being used? Is it performing like we designed it to, is it working as expected?
    • What error codes is my device reporting, and how is that affecting the customer experience?
    • How many of my devices are being used?
    • Where are they?
    • When are they used and how often?
    • Are they on or off?
    • How are my devices communicating with one another? If not, what’s not working?
    • How are my devices performing with connected ecosystems like smart homes or industrial infrastructure?

    Buddy uses standard technologies including REST service over HTTPS, which means any device with Internet connectivity can use Buddy. There are no agents, no heavy runtime to install, and the platform offers access managed, queried subsets of the data, which are available via completely customized JSON APIs.