u-blox has announced that its SARA cellular module series will provide wireless connectivity for a new end-to-end platform for Industry 4.0. With the platform, developed by Italian-based Iomote, businesses will be able to easily connect existing machines to the cloud to increase efficiency and augment their service offering. Iomote will present its new solution in a series of workshops that started in the Microsoft House in Milan this month.
The centerpiece of the platform is Iomote’s smart, programmable X400 gateway, which adds cloud connectivity to virtually any industrial application. Iomote also offers a handy web dashboard for the IIoT system administrators: MyMote. MyMote is used to manage operations such as provisioning, remote software upgrades of devices on the field, system notifications, and many others. Telemetry data on the other hand are sent directly to Microsoft Azure and are exclusively available to the customer, without third parties involved.
Industrial IoT solutions require real-time, bi-directional connectivity between the device and the cloud. Ensuring continuous connectivity was paramount for this application. Flexibility was another factor in Iomote’s decision to work with the u-blox solution.
The Iomote platform is designed to enable Industry 4.0 applications in a broad range of vertical markets. To facilitate customization for individual applications, the X400 gateway includes two processors. Connectivity, security, and over-the-air programming (OTA), which provide the backbone for industrial IoT applications, are handled on the Iomote core processor. Customer applications are run on the separate application processor, which is programmable using the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE). Field applications can be created in a matter of hours by leveraging the Arduino IDE and the abundance of libraries and software that are readily available.
