Smart Garden – Gardena

Smart Garden – Gardena

by | Mar 1, 2022 | Case Study

Ideation

Before the project, Gardena’s customers could schedule and control their robot lawnmower, but only through the lawnmower’s own interface. Gardena wanted to allow its customers to schedule and control their lawnmowers using an app. An app would also allow different Gardena products to be operated and orchestrated together. The first two products chosen were a humidity sensor and sprinkler system. Gardena had started in-house development of the lawnmower, but came into difficulties with wireless-signal range and creating a scalable system that could expand to other products. Seluxit’s existing technology offered a viable solution for both problems.

Development

Seluxit was able to help Gardena into the market in a very short timeframe because Seluxit already had a range of finished technology that could solve Gardena’s problems. In close cooperation with Gardena, Seluxit developed embedded hardware in the Gardena products which sends to and receives wireless signals from Seluxit’s IoT Platform via a home gateway. The Seluxit IoT Platform enables the app as well as forwarding product-usage data to Gardena’s ERP.

Production

Each of the Gardena products needed to be produced, including sourcing the bill of materials as well as managing the generation of unique keys in each product to ensure security. Moreover, the products’ radio technology needed to be certified and tested during the manufacturing process. All of these topics were handled by Seluxit.

Operation

Seluxit manages the operation and maintenance of the Gardena Smart system. Over-the-air updates ensure that any bug fixes are deployed to every device in the field automatically. At peak operation in August 2021, hundreds of thousands of devices generated more than 5 billion events or 22 TB of data, all handled by Seluxit.

Smart Meters – Innogy

Smart Meters – Innogy

by | Mar 1, 2022 | Case Study

Ideation

Innogy needed a residential smart-meter system (less than 6.000 kWh per year) with automatic meter reading to reduce costs. It also needed to give customers more detailed access to their energy-usage data than the billing data. Finally, it needed to have heightened security, such that a former tenant in an apartment couldn’t read meter data from his old meter, for example. In this phase, a POC was executed using a Seluxitdesigned development board with LoRa® technology, culminating with a pilot deployment of 3.000 meters in 2016. Close collaboration was a hallmark of the working process throughout the project.

Development

The project scope entailed high-security protocol development as well as radio modules for three different meter vendors (eBZ, Iskraemeco and EMH), enabled by LoRa® radio modulation, all vetted by the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik). Seluxit also started developing a full complimentary solution, from meter to cloud to an app, enabling new data-driven business models.

Production

With the development of the radio modules for the three-meter vendors successfully completed, production could begin. The first delivery in 2018 will be followed by a larger amount in 2019. The planned rollout is approximately 6,4 million over the next 15 years, contingent upon the continued success of the initial phases of the rollout. Seluxit’s expertise has allowed for smooth production, including key management, certification and testing.

Operation

With the initial roll-out already underway, Innogy looks to Seluxit to make sure that the large deployments of smart meters work as expected. It is necessary to have a procedure to allow for the updating of the firmware of each smart meter to solve software bugs as they appear. This is achieved through over-the-air updates (OTAU) which requires security measures to ensure that unauthorized parties are not able to make unauthorized updates.