Oct 06, 2022Presented here are recent news announcements in the radio frequency identification and Internet of Things industries.
Toppan Offers NFC Smart Packaging Solutions
Toppan, a provider of communication, security, packaging, décor materials and electronics solutions, has released several Near Field Communication (NFC) tags that can be attached to small or metallic containers. The company has also released smart packaging solutions that leverage tags in combination with a back-end, cloud-based ID authentication platform.
Super Mini-Sized NFC tag: Toppan has developed two concept models, with diameters of 7 millimeters and 8 millimeters, respectively, for use with compact containers, such as for small cosmetics products like lipsticks and mascara, as well as vials and syringes used in medical and pharmaceutical settings.
On-Metal NFC Tag: These NFC tags maintain performance even when attached to assets containing metal.
Cloud-based ID Authentication Platform: This cloud-based service enables product authentication; allows brands to provide product information, promotions and other services; and facilitates supply chain management, including traceability and monitoring of grey-market diversion, based on data collected.
Soracom Adds Native Satellite Support to IoT Platform
Soracom, a provider of IoT connectivity, has expanded its offerings to include native support for satellite messaging capability, allowing SMBs, SMEs and enterprise customers to manage SatIoT connections and billing directly through the Soracom platform. This capability is available now on a technical preview basis with support for Astrocast, and additional satellite services are expected to follow.
The launch of native support for satellite enables customers with remote monitoring, asset tracking and other use cases to use their own compatible satellite hardware and manage all connections and billing in one place. Users can integrate platform services supporting device management, cloud integration and secure private networking into IoT use cases requiring satellite communication.
Soracom has provided native support with integrated billing for cellular and Sigfox since 2018. In July 2021, it added support for Wi-Fi, Ethernet and satellite via Soracom Arc, which lets developers, startups and enterprises build IoT solutions using their connectivity of choice, as well as switch, add or blend connectivity options as requirements change, without rearchitecting applications.
According to Astrocast, terrestrial cellular networks now reach 90 percent of Earth's population but cover only 15 percent of the planet's surface. IoT deployments in remote locations, such as those found in precision agriculture, industry, mining, energy, and maritime and other industries, require the ubiquitous network availability that only satellite coverage can provide, the company reports.
"Soracom is committed to accelerating IoT deployments around the world and ensuring success at scale, no matter what combination of hardware, cloud platform, and wireless connectivity the use case requires," said Kenta Yasukawa, Soracom's cofounder and CTO, in a prepared statement. "With the addition of native satellite support, we are empowering our customers to build new experiences around connected devices while reducing total cost of ownership, accelerating speed to market, and ensuring complete control over every connection."
"There is significant demand within many industries for IoT deployments across the 85 percent of the globe that currently has zero cellular coverage," added Fabien Jordan, Astrocast's cofounder and CEO, in the statement. "Cost-effective, low-power, bidirectional satellite technology brings new opportunities for a broad range of innovative use cases. Combining the Soracom platform's capability and ease of use with Satellite IoT gives integrators and organizations a chance to explore and develop a new dimension to their IoT deployments."
Powercast Intros RF Wireless Charging with Sequans IoT Tech
Powercast, a provider of radio frequency (RF)-based over-the-air wireless power technology, has announced its cellular-based RF Power-Over-Distance Wireless Charging Platform. The platform, built around Sequans' Monarch cellular IoT connectivity technology, platform operates in the lower 600 to 900 MHz frequency bands licensed by mobile carriers.
Because cellular bands are licensed or private, they have more flexibility in terms of how much power they can transmit, the company explains, as well as for antenna gain and bandwidth. This enables end devices to charge faster and at greater distances when compared to unlicensed or public bands. As cellular service moves to higher frequencies like 5G to increase data throughput, carriers can monetize their underused low-frequency bands, providing the ability to simultaneously charge multiple consumer devices at a distance, such as smart-home security and automation IoT sensors, TV remotes, keyboards, ear buds, headphones, smart watches, fitness bands and hearing aids.
"Because many RF transmitting devices operate in unlicensed bands such as the 915 MHz band, there are limits on transmit power, antenna gain, and other parameters so many devices can coexist and be interoperable," said Charles Greene, Powercast's COO and CTO, in a prepared statement. "This innovative way to use licensed cellular frequencies to increase device charging power will allow manufacturers to create green, sustainable IoT devices that can charge more quickly and at longer distances from a cellular RF transmitter."
The platform combines Sequans' Monarch 2 GM02S module with a Powercast RF transmitting antenna to send RF over-the-air to a Powercast PCC110 Powerharvester receiver chip embedded in end devices. The Powerharvester harvests RF out of the air and converts it to direct current (DC) to either power a battery-free device or charge a rechargeable battery, both of which keep disposable batteries out of landfills.
"This collaborative effort to introduce cellular technology into the over-the-air RF wireless charging picture creates opportunities for more manufacturers to develop environmentally-friendly smart home IoT ecosystems that eliminate disposable batteries," added Louis Chuang, the executive VP and GM of Sequans' Massive IoT Business Unit, in the statement. "With cellular everywhere, the opportunities are endless. Powercast is pioneering this field, and shares Sequans' vision to make IoT more sustainable by integrating an increasing number of functionalities, and limiting the semiconductor carbon footprint."
Itron, SmartThings Partner on Utility Energy Analytics
Itron, which helps utilities and cities manage energy and water, has partnered with SmartThings (a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics) to provide an integrated energy experience by connecting Itron's Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network solution and SmartThings' services and solution. The companies plan to combine their IoT platforms to allow utilities to improve distributed energy management, accelerate carbon reduction and boost consumer engagement.
The collaboration will combine Itron's distributed intelligence (DI) ecosystem, which features millions of connected endpoints, with SmartThings' Energy service to provide real-time energy readings and consumption patterns to improve energy management and conservation. The solution, which will support multiple connectivity options, will bring together participating consumers' real-time consumption data from their meter, behind-the-meter assets and appliances, providing a complete picture of energy consumption.
Consumers that opt into their utility's program will gain greater visibility into their energy use and reduce their usage, the companies explain, while enabling utilities to improve grid management and visibility, as well as meet carbon-reduction goals. Energy companies can grow their demand-response (DR) programs with an AI-based energy-saving mode combined with high-fidelity real-time data from Itron's IIoT solution to initiate DR events for participating consumers, reducing the energy load of appliances.
The application displays a house's real-time consumption information, provided by Itron, while preexisting app features show real-time data use of smart appliances. Utilities will be able to engage SmartThings app users to enroll in energy efficiency, DR and EV charging programs.
"This collaboration will significantly accelerate consumers' understanding of their energy use, combining information from smart energy devices such as Samsung appliances, electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps, thermostats and more," said Don Reeves, Itron's senior VP of outcomes, in a prepared statement. "Our goal is to enable consumers to optimize their use of green, renewable energy and reduce their carbon footprint."
Wiliot Ambient Computing Facilities 6G Massive IoT
IoT company Wiliot has announced that its ambient computing technology, the Wiliot IoT Pixel, is helping to create a fully scaled Massive IoT encompassing trillions of "things." This, according to the company, will enable companies to address some of the world's biggest problems in the areas of supply chain efficiency, food and drug safety, and planetary sustainability, by utilizing 6G technology.
"While 5G tracked cars, appliances and shipping containers, 6G will track everything in those cars, appliances and shipping containers, evolving from an Internet of Expensive Things to an Internet of Trillions of Things, or Massive IoT," said Steve Statler, Wiliot's senior VP, in a prepared statement. "The arrival of 6G represents a seminal moment for both the IoT and telecommunications industry, as the latest technologies, standards and use cases converge to create a new economic order, rising to meet the challenges of supply chain disruption, omnichannel retail and the threat to the planet."
According to the company, the inclusion of ambient computing within 6G opens the opportunity for wireless carriers to expand beyond services for a few billion mobile devices to include the trillions of things to which mobile devices can connect. 6G can provide standards that will allow billions of wireless-enabled devices to talk directly to trillions of packages, clothes, tools, food products, and medicine containers. Wiliot says the ambient computing technology in its IoT Pixels is helping to create this 6G Massive IoT. The stamp-sized computer stickers can be attached to any product or packaging and power themselves using recycled ambient energy waves (see Wiliot Expands BLE Sensor Solution with Platform, V2 Chips).
"It's going to take trillions of connections to solve the world's biggest challenges," Statler said in the statement. "Every single thing in our global supply chain—veggies and vaccines, crates and skates, airplane parts and toy airplanes—all connected to the Internet and transmitting real-time, item-level information about their location, temperate, fill rate, carbon footprint, and more. This is the IoT we've long been promised and now, thanks to breakthroughs in ambient computing, we're finally positioned to unlock its full potential."
HiveMQ Enables IoT Data Ingestion, MQTT Tracing and Debugging
HiveMQ, a provider of enterprise MQTT solutions, has announced the availability of its Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, a new feature that integrates MQTT data into Google Cloud. MQTT is an OASIS standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things, designed as a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport for connecting remote devices. MQTT is used in a variety of industries, such as automotive, manufacturing, telecommunications, and oil and gas.
HiveMQ says companies can employ its standards-based platform to send IoT data reliably and securely to Google Cloud enterprise services, including monitoring, analytics and machine learning. The technology is designed to help businesses connect devices to the Internet. Its MQTT platform allows users to move data from device to cloud in a secure, reliable and scalable manner, the company reports. More than 130 businesses have utilized HiveMQ's offerings for such use cases as connected cars, transportation, logistics, Industry 4.0 and connected IoT products.
"Our goal as a cloud-native MQTT broker is to give customers a reliable and scalable solution they can use to deploy business-critical IoT systems," said Christian Götz, HiveMQ's CEO and co-founder, in a prepared statement. "We now provide the tight integration of IoT data with Google Cloud so customers can more easily adopt Google services like AI and machine learning and derive insights from their data."
Google recently announced plans to retire Google IoT Core, leaving customers with less than a year to migrate their IoT applications to a new service. HiveMQ says it can replace IoT Core's MQTT data-ingestion service to connect MQTT clients using HiveMQ's MQTT broker, then map the MQTT message into Google Pub/Sub.
"With HiveMQ, customers can continue to benefit from advanced Google Cloud services while keeping their ecosystem agile with an open standards-based architecture," Götz added in the statement. "We're not only making MQTT data ingestion without Google IoT Core easy, we're also helping customers create a more open architecture that can adapt to evolving IoT technologies and support a multi-cloud environment."
HiveMQ 4.9 includes the Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub/Sub, available now for customer preview with general release at the end of September. This extension enables users to authenticate data using Google Cloud service accounts or WIF tokens, as well as integrate multiple Google Cloud projects, and to transfer data between Google Cloud Pub/Sub and the HiveMQ broker with MQTT to Google Pub/Sub topic mapping.
In addition, the platform lets users aggregate and distribute messages between the HiveMQ broker and Google Pub/Sub on a per-message basis; convert MQTT user properties to Pub/Sub attributes and vice versa, using a configuration framework to retain data between the HiveMQ broker and Google Cloud; automatically add MQTT-specific flags, such as QoS and retained message, to Pub/Sub messages ingested from Google Cloud; and utilize a transformer pipeline to perform additional manipulation of messages in either direction at runtime.
In a separate announcement, the company has announced the availability of its HiveMQ Distributed Tracing Extension, which makes it possible to trace and debug MQTT data streams from device to cloud and back. Complete IoT observability requires insight into three pillars, the company explains: metrics, traces and logs. HiveMQ has added distributed tracing to help organizations achieve end-to-end observability and make their IoT applications more performant and resilient.
Distributed Tracing allows users to trace events and achieve a high-level overview of a message's journey through multiple, complex systems. With the Extension, the company claims, HiveMQ is the first MQTT broker to add OpenTelemetry support to provide complete transparency for every publish message that uses the HiveMQ MQTT broker. OpenTelemetry is an open standard for instrumentation that allows for interoperability across all services so organizations can achieve visibility over their entire system.
"We're the first MQTT broker to enable true IoT observability so customers can trace MQTT data and gather diagnostic information in real-time rather than after the fact," Götz noted in the statement. "IoT observability is key as it allows customers to quickly identify latency bottlenecks or reasons for failure in critical transactions and decrease the time spent resolving these issues."
HiveMQ offers integration into a range of application performance monitoring (APM) tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace and Honeycomb, or open-source alternatives like Grafana Tempo. APM tools are being adopted rapidly, but when used alone they typically have a blind spot around the MQTT data, which leads to poor observability of applications. The Distributed Tracing Extension, HiveMQ says, shortens the time required to discover and resolve issues.
"In a complex architecture, customers often don't know where to start when they experience a problem," Götz added in the statement. "Say opening the car door with a mobile application is taking 5 to 10 seconds instead of 1 second. A detailed look at where the message request traveled and how long it took at each step makes it easy to identify the root cause of latency so it can be fixed." HiveMQ 4.9 includes the Distributed Tracing Extension and is available now.
