Dec 02, 2016Bangkok Expands BlipTrack Wi-Fi Bluetooth Sensor Solution
The city of Bangkok, Thailand, is expanding its use of the BlipTrack queue- and flow-management sensor solution from Blip Systems to cover additional roads. The expansion will provide city engineers with travel times and congestion alerts, in order to ease traffic woes and provide drivers with real-time traffic information.
Thailand's Department of Highway (DOH) was pleased with the traffic data collected by its BlipTrack Wi-Fi Bluetooth sensors, the company reports, and is now expanding the technology to cover additional roads in Bangkok. The city has some of the worst traffic congestions in the world. Faced with the challenges of trying to ease traffic and reduce massive gridlocks, the DOH needed a solution to help provide live and detailed traffic information. To help measure and provide travel times and traffic flow, and to predict traffic build-up, the city implemented the BlipTrack solution in 2015.
"The Department of Highway wanted to measure and compare travel times on the Intercity Motorway, The Bangkok Expressway and neighboring routes in Bangkok," said JJ Nutayakul, the managing director of New Trend Development Co., in a prepared statement. "The idea was to present real-time traffic information to road users, via DOH's Highway Traffic mobile app, to help them make informed decisions when planning their trip."
The mobile app, which provides information on travel times, fastest routes and other traffic information, is continually updated, in line with the actual behavior of road users. So, by considering their route and the time they depart, motorists help to keep the traffic moving. The BlipTrack data will help to provide economic benefits through reduced travel times, fuel consumption and vehicle emissions.
"This was the first project ever in Thailand, where this kind of technology, in the traffic field, has been implemented and it has shown great results," Nutayakul said. "The client, the Department of Highway, is very pleased with how fast the installation has been, the ease of configuration and the hardware reliability."
"BlipTrack has helped Thai citizens to travel home faster during two major traffic events: Songkran and New Year holidays," said Songrit Chayanan, director of the Samut Sakhon Highway District, in the prepared statement. "The system allowed not only road users to decide route choices via travel time info online but also the Thai Highway Police to manage traffic in real time."
According to Blip Systems, BlipTrack sensors are placed at strategic points along roads. The sensors, covering roughly a 600-kilometer section of highway in and around Bangkok, detect Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices, found in mobile phones and in car audio and communication systems. Re-identifying the devices from multiple sensors enables specific and accurate statistical information, such as travel times, average speeds, dwell times and movement patterns, to become available.
"The solution gives more accurate travel time data compared to spot speed data collected from radar and ANPR cameras," Nutayakul said. "Furthermore, the origin/destination data is used by city engineers to gain an in-depth insight into the understanding of traffic flows and the development of traffic jams, in order to optimize the road network and reduce congestion."
Autodesk, Taxal Conducts Research into IoT Trends
Throughout 2016, Autodesk and Taxal conducted a study titled "IoT Trends and Situations," with the goal of examining manufacturers' situations, trends, enablers and inhibitors with regard to the Internet of Things. The study consisted of in-depth, one-on-one telephone interviews with more than 280 companies across a range of industrial markets and geographies. It was designed to capture statistically relevant information, as well as qualitative and subjective feedback, with more than 85 percent of those interviewed comprising company executives and managers.
The study's results indicated the urgency that respondents place on its proposition. Fifty-six percent of interviewed companies are currently active in IoT projects that either are already in market or will be during the next 12 months, while 78 percent expect to be active within the next three years. The importance of the IoT to business was reinforced by the fact that 50 percent of respondents currently see the Internet of Things as critical or very important to their company, with 35 percent deeming it worthy of additional development investment beyond normal research and development activities.
With regard to benefits, 50 percent of the companies interviewed believe that the IoT helps them to differentiate their offerings, while 58 percent feel that it helps them better compete with others in their markets. Fifty-two percent of those studied indicated the IoT will allow them to develop new services for their customers, with 49 percent viewing it as a technology that helps them to improve their products' uptime.
While many businesses are active in developing for the IoT, or soon will be, only 30 percent of those studied said they were "ready and enabled" for what's to come. Thirty-eight percent indicated that they were making progress, while 32 percent said they believe there is still much to do. According to the study, there are many reasons behind these statistics, including the need to invest in infrastructure and new technology, and to develop and recruit the new skills required for the IoT era.
Oasis Smart SIM Showcases eSIM Solution for IoT Connected Devices
During the recent ARM TechCon event, Oasis Smart SIM demonstrated its embedded Software SIM, which allows users to embed universal subscriber identity module (USIM) functionalities in devices and machines without the constraint of having to integrate removable or built-in SIM hardware, and providing seamless connectivity and remote provisioning of IoT smart devices.
The eSIM Operating System runs securely on an ARM-based processor and works in tandem with eOS Subscription Manager, the company's associated remote SIM provisioning and lifecycle-management platform. The platform enables the device to be securely provisioned and managed with multiple network subscriptions.
"Oasis has been an expert in the field of SIM and USIM operating systems for years, through its trademarked HeliOS product, and our technology is embedded in more than 200 million devices via standard removable SIM cards or embedded M2M modules," said Olivier Leroux, the company's CEO, in a prepared statement. "Our motto being to reshape the SIM business, our '2 clicks connectivity' solution based on a SoftSIM application and its complimentary remote subscription manager is clearly meeting this ambition. It embeds the USIM functionality and more generally IoT connectivity directly into devices, avoiding the use of removable SIM hardware, which increases the manufacturing costs and time-to-market for device makers."
The complimentary subscription-management platform, enabling users to remotely switch networks and manage the eSIM lifecycle, is intended to ease customers' logistics issues, Leroux explained, allowing them the freedom to choose and switch cellular operators as they see fit. "This is the way we reshape our ecosystem," he said in the statement.
Ams Launches AS7221 Smart Lighting Manager
Ams AG, a provider of sensors and analog ICs, has announced the AS7221, which the company calls the industry's first integrated white-tunable smart-lighting manager. Lighting manufacturers designing products with the AS7221 can quickly integrate high-precision CCT capabilities into their Internet of Things smart-lighting offerings. The system's architecture, which includes an I2C extension interface, enables the AS7221 to provide capabilities for sensing functions, such as air quality, temperature, occupancy and presence.
The AS7221 is equipped with an embedded tri-stimulus CIE XYZ color sensor to enable precise color sensing, with direct mapping to the CIE 1931 color space. This smart-lighting manager is a fully integrated luminaire control system, compatible with standard 0-10V inputs and enabled for IoT connectivity and network control through standard clients, such as Bluetooth Smart, ZigBee and Wi-Fi. LED control for spectral tuning is implemented via direct PWM channel outputs, the company reports, resulting in a high-precision solution that slashes development and integration times compared with more bulky discrete component approaches.
"With LEDs having enabled the digital lighting revolution, the next logical step is to control integration directly into the luminaires," said Philip Smallwood, the director of LED and lighting research for photonics market research firm Strategies Unlimited, in a prepared statement. "Two potential keys to that move, which make it both practical and cost-effective, are sensor fusion and core integration at the semiconductor device level. The result will take us right down the path of realizing the LED lighting industry's long-standing vision of truly controllable, connected and human-centered smart lighting that will deliver well-being, productivity and efficiency benefits across the board."
The AS7221 is the first extension to ams' recently announced Cognitive Lighting smart-lighting manager family. The compact AS7221 will be available in a 5-millimeter by 5-millimeter LGA package, the company reports, for flexible integration into both luminaires and larger replacement lamps. The device provides precise color point tuning, smoothly controlling CCT transitions between configured warm and cool white LED strings within a luminaire. In addition, the AS7221 includes automatic configuration support for ams' TSL4531 ambient light sensor for turnkey daylighting capabilities.
"The next generation of lighting will be defined by three key characteristics: controllability, adaptation and connected architectures," said Tom Griffiths, ams' senior marketing manager, in the prepared statement. "Our new family of smart lighting managers meet those criteria. With this latest entry, we are addressing the luminaire manufacturers' critical time-to-market challenge for developing and deploying a spectrally tunable luminaire that is cost-effective and accurate, and which smoothly integrates into the Internet of Things."
Key features include a tri-stimulus XYZ color sensor for direct mapping into the CIE color space; a serial UART for simple connection to standard networks and wireless clients; a fully network-enabled architecture with a high-level, driverless command set for an array of integrated luminaire controls; and I2C expansion capability, to enable IoT sensor-hub platform functionality.
Pricing for the AS7221 Spectral Tuning IoT Smart Lighting Manager is set at $3.13 each in quantities of 10,000 pieces, and the system is also available in production volumes. Additional information is available at the company's website, at by contacting cognitivelighting@ams.com.
ETSI Publishes Smart-Home Specifications
ETSI has released three Home Gateway Initiative specifications as Technical Specifications. Following the closure of the Home Gateway Initiative in June 2016, work on the three specifications was transferred to ETSI. They have now been published using the ETSI Publicly Available Specification process.
The three specifications are ETSI TS 103 424, which deals with smart-home architecture and system requirements; ETSI TS 103 425, which describes requirements for wireless home area networks (WHANs) supporting smart-home services; and ETSI TS 103 426, which contains requirements for HGI Open Platform 2.1 regarding modular software deployments on home gateways. They are also available here.
The ETSI Publicly Available Specification (PAS) process enables an organization that has signed an agreement with ETSI to submit one or more of its Publicly Available Specifications for adoption by ETSI as an ETSI Technical Specification or ETSI Technical Report. According to ETSI, a Publicly Available Specification published as an ETSI Technical Specification benefits from ETSI's recognition as a European Standards Organization and reputation as a provider of standards for global use. Submitting a PAS to be published by ETSI can also be a first step toward it becoming a European standard. These three specifications from the HGI are the first to be published by ETSI under its recently revised PAS process. Further information about the PAS process is available at ETSI's website.
"HGI consulted closely with ETSI SmartM2M during the development of these key documents," said Enrico Scarrone, the chairman of ETSI's SmartM2M Technical Committee, in a prepared statement. "This work complements our own work on smart appliances very well, and we're happy to integrate these HGI requirements into our family of specifications."