All posts tagged: of things

The Axeda Machine Cloud platform is a secure and scalable cloud platform for connected products, machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things networks which is backed up by professional, commercial support and a growing library of technical content and resources.

This versatile platform enables system integrators, solution architects, and developers to quickly and easily connect, manage and innovate powerful machine-to-machine systems, connected products and IoT applications, potentially faster and at a lower cost than with internally built solutions.

Covering a wide spectrum of areas, the Axeda platform addresses the complex requirements that are often invisible but vital to overall success, providing an end-to-end M2M solution, and not just the application user interface that your end-users see. The Axeda platform enables you to connect and communicate with any wired or wireless asset, innovating with M2M and IoT connectivity for connected product solutions.

As part of the Axeda platform, their “Machine Cloud” service includes M2M and IoT connectivity services, software agents and toolkits that enable you to establish connectivity between your devices or assets and the Axeda platform while allowing you to choose the communication methods and hardware that best suit the needs of your IoT solutions. Thus you can connect to any product using any device over any communications channel including cellular networks, WiFi, satellite, or any form of Internet connectivity, for any application.

Axeda’s M2M connectivity services include multiple types of solutions, covering different classes of devices or assets that you may need to connect to. Axeda firewall-friendly agents are software agents that run on Linux or Windows and install directly on your asset devices (if equipped with these operating systems) or on a gateway computer on your network that is connected to your assets, providing user-friendly cloud service connectivity out through firewalls without difficult firewall administration.

Working with the platform is made easier by the supplied Wireless Agent Toolkits – Java or ANSI C libraries for embedding Axeda connectivity into your devices, compiled into your own software and executed on a wide variety of embedded computer hardware platforms. These different choices offer a great deal of flexibility in getting the Axeda platform operating with your existing hardware, software and networks.

The Axeda Machine Cloud supports the open MQTT protocol, which is becoming increasingly popular and important in Internet-of-Things applications. Axeda Ready gateways support MQTT networks right out of the box, and can listen to any MQTT broker, allowing for support of local MQTT-based sensor and device networks as well as connectivity between MQTT device networks and the Axeda machine cloud.

For support of other protocols, Axeda’s Device Protocol Adapters connect to many different IoT message protocols in common use today, and these device communication servers can be extended with custom “codecs” to support new protocols, translating the native communications protocol(s) of your device or network into a form that the Axeda platform can understand and process.

The Axeda Ready program broadens the device options available to consumers, allowing you to choose the right communications technology for your Internet of Things applications. Axeda Ready is a technical compatibility approval program for communications devices and modules for embedded and machine-to-machine communications, ensuring device compatibility with the Axeda platform, speeding time to market for your designs that are aimed at use with the Axeda platform, ensuring accurate and secure data communication, and creating useful expectations of technical support and compatibility when approved hardware is used with the Axeda platform.

Futhermore maintenance and control is simple with the Axeda Wireless Console, which enables users to manage their connected assets, devices and SIMs from a single machine, eliminating the need to integrate with multiple separate platforms. Using the Axeda Wireless Console allows for easier activation and deactivation of device SIMs, better management of rate plans and traffic, and real-time configuration of alerts and alarms from remote assets.

By making SIM data available to the Axeda rules engine and APIs, developers can program logic that uses SIM billing and usage data in machine-to-machine applications to configure device behaviour and adjust plans on the fly, minimising network costs whilst also keeping the communication available when it is needed.

Axeda’s advanced M2M cloud service allows you to easily get started managing connected products, building and deploying IoT and M2M applications in confidence, backed up by Axeda’s own robust, secure and scalable data centre infrastructure, with professional operations and customer support.

Their on-demand cloud service is reliable, secure and professionally supported, allowing reliable deployment of your IoT applications without the challenges and overhead of administering and implementing the technology and hosting infrastructure yourself.

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Axeda provides a pay-as-you-go model that minimises risk, rapid deployment to help you realise a relatively fast return on investment, and rapid and easy implementation to reduce the difficulty of initial implementation of your system. Axeda offers much lower upfront capital investment, with an annual subscription to their service removing a need for investment in your own servers and infrastructure.

You can focus on the business side of Internet-of-Things applications, without the need to purchase, maintain and support server infrastructure yourself.

Axeda’s Internet-of-Things cloud platform promises faster time-to-value, since your solution can be deployed more rapidly on their server infrastructure, without having to first put that infrastructure in place yourself.

You can host your own applications that you build and deploy on the Axeda Platform at Axeda’s on-demand centre, simplifying the maintenance and administration of your complete M2M and IoT solutions. Axeda offers enterprise-grade security, availability, and scalability, so you can rely on their secure and scalable infrastructure built on high-quality hardware and software investments and their operational expertise, without worrying about it yourself. Ongoing administration is performed by experts in the Axeda application, networking, security, hosting, data protection, and database administration.

As you can see, the Axeda platform offers another option in the growing cloud-based IoT infrastructure market, and if this meets your needs we can work with you to bring your product ideas into reality. If you have a great prototype or idea – and need to take it to the market, our team of engineers can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Muhammad AwaisAxeda – the Cloud Platform for IoT and M2M

The wireless lighting control market has seen a shift in recent years away from bespoke or proprietary lighting solutions, as efficient and low cost solutions have been introduced to the general market based around standards that you may already by familiar with – such as ZigBee – which provide opportunities for greater system standardisation and interoperability.

Whilst consumers increasingly recognise the value of the convenience, flexibility, and comfort that wireless, embedded “Internet-of-Things” devices bring to the home or office, a barrier to widespread adoption of these kinds of home automation systems in the past has been that traditionally, most product manufacturers have not provided a system that allows interoperability among different lighting and home automation vendors.

ZigBee Light Link was created to save time, money and installation labour by standardising simple, easy to install networks of intelligent lighting as well as control devices such as light switches, occupancy sensors, daylight sensors and Wi-Fi connected network gateways which allow the ZigBee Light Link network to be controlled by the consumer from a PC, tablet or smartphone.

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As one of many ZigBee application profiles, ZigBee Light Link is a ZigBee application profile aimed at intelligent, wireless control of household lighting. It provides the lighting industry with a global standard for interoperable “smart” consumer lighting and control products that are easy to use, and it allows consumers to achieve wireless control over all their LED fixtures, light bulbs, timers, remotes and switches from their smartphone, PC or tablet. Products using the ZigBee Light Link standard allow consumers to configure their lighting remotely to reflect ambience, task or season, whilst at the same time improving energy efficiency.

The ZigBee Light Link 1.0 application profile is currently published, whilst the ZigBee Light Link 1.1 application profile specification is presently under development. Leading home lighting solution manufacturers who have contributed to the development of the ZigBee Light Link standard include GE, Greenwave, OSRAM Sylvania and Philips.

Products employing the ZigBee Light Link standard, and earning the ZigBee Certified seal, are known to the consumer to be interoperable and as easy to use as a common dimmer switch. Adding or removing devices from the lighting network is quick and easy, making it easy and intuitive for consumers to use every day. Since ZigBee Light Link is a ZigBee standard, ZigBee Light Link-based smart lighting solutions will interoperate effortlessly with consumers’ other devices employing ZigBee standards such as ZigBee Home Automation, ZigBee Input Device and ZigBee Remote Control.

A ZigBee Light Link network is a secure mesh network which allows communication to be safely relayed by multiple individual network nodes, i.e. control devices and lamps. A single light or group of lights can have the user’s favourite lighting state stored in memory and recalled immediately – even for a whole house worth of lights, at the press of a button.

Additional nodes can easily be added to or removed from the network without affecting system functionality or integrity. Adding or removing lamps is very easy and robust. Contrary to other networking solutions, it does not matter which lamp is installed first, or whether other lamps in the network are switched on or off. With ZigBee Light Link, adding a new lamp at a remote location is as easy as adding a new lamp within RF range.

Smartphones, tablets and PCs can control lighting products based on ZigBee Light Link via a ZigBee network gateway connected to ethernet or a Wi-Fi network. Such a connection also allows the ZigBee Light Link network to be controlled via the Internet, via web applications or mobile smartphone apps, for example.

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Devices such as ZigBee-networked wireless wall switches and remote controls may also be used to control the lighting network. Functionality such as automatic timer control, “alarm clock” use, or “vacation mode” security use can also be defined in software and configured by the user with a simple software interface on the PC or mobile device.

The ZigBee Light Link profile can be used with ZigBee transceivers and ZigBee-ready system-on-chip microcontrollers from several semiconductor manufacturers – for example, the CC2531 or CC2538 IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee System-on-Chip solutions from Texas Instruments.

 Texas Instruments offers the Z-Stack Lighting Software for the CC2530 ZigBee-enabled RF system-on-chip, which is an implementation of ZigBee Light Link and comes with a sample demonstration program for both a wireless “smart light” and “smart switch”, allowing engineers to easily get started in the development of an easy to use lighting control solution based around ZigBee Light Link.

The Z-Stack Lighting development kit from Texas Instruments consists of two “Z-Light” reference design RGB LED lamps based around the CC2531 chip programmed as ZigBee Light Link Colour Lights and a CC2531-based USB gateway dongle programmed as a ZigBee Light Link Colour Scene Remote, which can be operated independently as a remote control with on-board buttons or used as a gateway to interface the lighting network to PC software, for software-based advanced control and functionality.

This development kit contains everything needed to set up a basic ZigBee Light Link network and control the lamps either individually or in groups using either buttons on the controller node or software on the PC. TI’s website contains tools and application examples for free download that can be used to experiment with more advanced features of the ZigBee Light Link lighting control protocol and to develop demonstrators for direct wireless control or control from cloud-based or web services. Schematics and documentation for these hardware reference designs are also fully provided for free download from TI.

Thus the information and hardware is available for you to integrate products into this new standard of wireless lighting control, and if this technology interests your organisation but don’t have the expertise in – or just need to have it taken care of by a team of experts – and you’re not sure how to progress with a reliable implementation, we can partner with you to take care of this either in revisions of existing products or as part of new designs.

With our experience in retail and commercial products we have the ability to target your product’s design to the required end-user market and all the steps required to make it happen.

We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design. https://lx-group.com.au

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

 

Muhammad AwaisLX Group examines the Zigbee Light Link system