The customer, an Indian Subsidiary of one of the Global Pioneers in Renewable Energy generation.
The customer had earlier partnered with us for the development and implementation of IoT based Solar Tracking System.
Some of the key components of the high–efficiency Solar Energy Tracking System developed by Embitel included:
This field deployed IoT based Solar Energy Harvesting Solution, designed and developed by Embitel’ s IoT developers, has been instrumental in helping our customer to improve the efficiency of power generation and remote management of their on-field industrial assets.
Also Read: Customer Success Story- IoT Platform Development & SCADA solution for the Solar Tracking System.
The following block diagram gives an overview of the IoT based Solar Energy Harvesting System
However, they found that the off-the shelf Control Room Gateway, which has been integrated into the existing solution, had many complex set of subsystems and features which were seldom used.
Additionally, the off-the shelf gateway device was designed by deploying multiple control Units or Modules for managing specific tasks. All these lead to an additional BOM cost and increased complexity of the IoT Gateway architecture.
Thus, with the aim of reducing the cost of the Control Room Gateway and simplifying the hardware architecture, customer decided to invest in a custom-built control room gateway device.
After having worked with Embitel for the full-fledged Solar Energy Harvesting Solution, the customer was impressed with Embitel’ s expertise in Product Engineering and Industrial Automation services . Customer had no hesitation in further extending this partnership for the new project.
Embitel’ s IoT experts performed a detailed analysis of the functional requirements of the Control Room gateway device.
This analysis revealed that the several components and architecture of the existing Field Gateway, developed by Embitel for the customer, can be re-used for the customization of the Control Room Gateway.
The new Control Room Gateway device basically had to be a scaled-up version of the Field Gateway Device, with additional control features and peripherals.
The re-usability of the existing IoT Gateway hardware and software proved to be a great value-add for this entire project.
Please refer to the following block diagram to get an overview of the Control Gateway Device and various peripherals connected to it.
Image 2: Block diagram of the Control Gateway Device and the connected subsystems
Features of the Custom Built Control Room Gateway:
Custom hardware modules and peripherals were developed and integrated with the control gateway device to support the following features:
The integration of custom developed Control Room gateway device, as a replacement of the off-the-shelf device, helped the customer in reducing the overall cost by significant levels.