Author: DASH7 Administartor

Events, News

December Webinar

The DASH7 webinar of December 15th was centered around presenting two new applications were DASH7 was applied in the field. It contained 2 parts, both parts are recorded.

1. Presentation “Connected emergency showers in the O&G” by Frank Gielissen from Aloxy

Link to powerpoint Aloxy emergency showers

Link to video

2. Presentation “Enabling battery-less environmental sensing with DASH7” by Priyesh pappinisseri Puluckul from Imec / UAntwerp

Link to powerpoint DASH7 Webinar 15122021

Link to video

 

To follow the next webinar, please follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for the newsletter.

News

Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact radar

Emerging technologies in IoT such as Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) coupled with acceleration of data mining, machine learning, AI is creating disruptive innovation opportunities according to Gartner when they presented the 2021 “Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact radar: Internet of Things”.

The Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar is an analysis of the maturity, market momentum and influence of emerging technologies and trends. In this Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar, Gartner includes 18 emerging technologies and trends (ETTs) with horizontal impact on IoT technology and service providers (TSPs), as related to the TSPs’ ability to pivot forward and accelerate their business opportunities. These 18 technology profiles cover both the “what” and the “how” – areas for product investment, foundational technologies, and related nontechnology trends (see below Figure).

 

Gartner

LPWAN is one of the few technologies with very high impact (Mass) and the one that will be crucial today (Now, 0 to 3 years).

LPWA Networks are a key technology since it provides connectivity suited to batteries or harvesting energy and offer greater range than alternative technologies. The technology is considered low cost compared to alternatives as the hardware required to build sensors in such network is less expansive.

DASH7 is a great example of an LPWA Network and offers great advantages over WIFI or other low range network technologies. According to Gartner one of the killer applications for LPWAN is asset tracking and within the DASH7 Alliance we see several members building their business on DASH7 technology for this application.

At the same time DASH7 offers more, we see other applications being successfully deployed at large scale like parking guidance (Onesitu), Manual valve position indication (Aloxy), alerting system (Vestfold), people counting (Crowdscan) and connected interiorscapers (Nurtio – Jitter).

The DASH7 Alliance is a non-profit organization formed to foster the existence and the further development of the DASH7 protocol. Our members form an ecosystem of builders, users, and developers with deep knowledge in LPWAN and they are happy to support you on your IoT journey.

Events, News

September Webinar

DASH7 September webinar

The DASH7 webinar of September 30th was centered “getting started with DASH7” and contained 2 parts, both parts are recorded.

1. Presentation “Getting started with DASH7: the wizziKit” by Jeremie Greffe & Marin Bonsergent from Wizzilab

2. Presentation “Sub-IoT:Enabling communication in sub-optimal environments by Liam Oorts from Aloxy

To follow the next webinar, please follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for the newsletter.

News

DASH7 Alliance board renewal

We are happy to announce, the DASH7 Alliance have renewed the board for the coming two years. 

The newly elected board members are:

– David Kerr-Munslow, Cortus
– Glenn Ergeerts, Aloxy
– Maarten Weyn, University of Antwerp
– Michael Andre, Wizzilab
– Paal Kristian Levang, Nornir

The new board elected Michael Andre as President, Maarten Weyn as Treasurer and David Kerr-Munslow as Secretary. 

The main objective of the Alliance is to foster the existence and the further development of the DASH7 protocol specification. To do so wider adaptation of the protocol and a larger ecosystem of members, users and developers is key.

The newly elected board is committed to grow the community and to continue organizing events to share content and knowledge around the usage and development of the DASH7 specification protocol. More specifically the board wants to activate more members to share content and experience and reach out to potential new members to understand their needs and interest.

The board recognizes the Alliance is relative small however the number of active users and new members in the last 12 months increased. Beside that, the spec is dowloaded numerous times per week and that both offers potential and indicates interest is growing.

Therefor the online events as organized during COVID lockdown will continue and the  next online event will be in September due to the upcoming / ongoing holidays, detailed information on the subject and date will be communicated at a later stage.

For now Happy holidays and we hope to see you in one of the upcoming webinars.

Schermafbeelding 2021-08-04 om 09.52.55
Members, News

We welcome OneSitu

Last month we welcomed Onesitu to the DASH7 Alliance, let’s look a bit closer at this interesting company and find out what the partnership brings for both parties.

Onesitu is a provider of intelligent and connected solutions. Onesitu offers autonomous mobile solutions to revolutionize urban parking in cities of the future. They design and manufacture in France a whole range of wireless Smart Parking sensors and information screens, that lead the client in the right area. The system allows the mall tenants to retrieve statistics about their parking (number of unique visitors, time of stay, favorite area to stay). Their mission is to transform parking into a fluid experience at the service of the 21st century.

The DASH7 Alliance is composed of university researchers, innovative companies, and individuals that want to make a difference in helping people connect wireless devices using battery operated transmitters that operate for multiple years. Joining the DASH7 Alliance helps to build the ecosystem around usage and implementation of the open-source protocol.

Onesitu has already deployed thousands of DASH7 connected parking sensors. More than 80.000 parking spots are connected in real time, guiding more than 1.000.000 vehicles every day.

Even though Onesitu already uses DASH7 and developed their solutions based on the DASH7 wireless protocol it is still important to become a member. Gauthier Jourdain, CTO at Onesitu explains that most of their existing solutions rely on DASH7 and therefor its evolution and improvements have a direct impact on their products.

Gauthier adds that to continue their development and growth, it is mandatory to have the best possible view on the future DASH7 evolution. The DASH7 membership also allows Onesitu to join in the PAG (protocol Action Group) which provides them the opportunity to participate in its development.

Beside this, Gauthier expresses that the existing members of the Alliance are very interesting companies, and he looks forward to interacting and explore new partnerships with mutual benefits.

On the technology side, DASH7 is a very interesting IoT protocol for Onesitu, their IoT products are dedicated to smart parking, thus real-time information needs to be available. DASH7 is the best protocol to achieve that according to Gauthier. “We are constantly improving our products and deploying new features; DASH7 allows us to easily upgrade over the air. I really think there is nothing better than DASH7 for our use case, and it gives us a true edge with regards to our competitors.”

Michael André, president of the DASH7 Alliance welcomes Onesitu and comments “It as a real contribution to the alliance. A company like Onesitu, who has already used the technology at scale is a real added value in our community”. The experience from the field provides great insights and learnings to further optimize the protocol. At the same time new members or wireless technology adopters can learn from Onesitu’s experiences. We look forward to their appearance in one of our webinars.

To summarize, DASH7 sits at the basis of the Onesitu business model and becoming a member provides new opportunities for both Onesitu and the alliance ecosystem. It is the intent of the Alliance to enhance the technology beyond its current capabilities and physical boundaries to enable security, automation, and control systems for a multitude of environments. The development of the wireless network protocol and an experienced user like Onesitu are an ideal match to drive the growth of a sustainable ecosystem based on open-source software innovation.

 

close up photo of batteries
Features

Battery lifetime matters, choose your network wisely!

Low Power versus Ultra low Power, these are popular statements used by sensor manufacturers, it makes sense, as from various reports it becomes clear battery lifetime is the most important aspect when considering a sensor beside functionality of course. However, the type of wireless network has an enormous impact on the sensor power consumption, making the selection of the LPWAN wireless network protocol a critical factor to consider when developing your application.

Many articles are written nowadays around the subject of successful IIoT implementations and lack of it. For one, the business case plays an important role and understanding the IIoT inter-dependability of sensors, network, gateways and IoT infrastructure and how they influence performance such as battery consumption  and consequently the business case is an essential part of potential success. 

Power consumption and related battery lifetime has an enormous impact on the business case, for some sensors this would be the end of life and for others it would result in battery replacements costing both time and money. 

As the network impacts the battery lifetime in multiple ways it is important to really understand network pro’s and con’s and its role in the ecosystem rather than taking the network selection for granted based on characteristics that seem to be important however have a negative effect on the business case. The tradeoff between range and battery consumption is one of these aspects to review closely. 

The most important aspects determining the net capacity of the battery are peak current level, peak duration, sleep current level, recovery time between peaks and ambient temperature. The peak level and peak duration are both influenced by the choice of network technology and the network deployment. 

There is a strong relation between transmission power and the peak current height, the power amplifier of the radio consumes a lot of energy. DASH7 nodes can scale their TX power when the link budget to their prefered gateway is comfortable enough, resulting in energy savings (and less interference as well) on the network as a whole.

A higher data rate means a shorter peak duration and thus less battery consumption. DASH7 offers 3 data rates: high (166.7 kb/s), normal (55.6 kb/s) and lo-rate (9.6 kb/s). A higher data-rate implies a lower range, therefore it is a tradeoff which depends on the use case. The lowest data rate of DASH7 is still higher than the highest data rate offered by for example LoRaWAN (SF7, 5.468  kb/s) and 10 times higher than a more typical data rate of LoRaWAN (SF10, in EU). 

As this is a trade-off, this implies that the maximum range of DASH7 is shorter. For these mid-range scenarios the higher data rates does result in serious energy consumption savings.

The network infrastructure deployment also influences the above, a denser gateway deployment allows the use of a faster data rate which is beneficial for the peak duration and thus again less battery consumption. Also, a denser gateway deployment allows downscaling the TX power, which in turn impacts the peak height. 

In many scenarios it is more cost efficient to deploy a denser gateway network, compared to the cost of more frequent sensor device or battery replacements in the field. Especially when a large number of sensors are expected, a high density network has several advantages in both power savings and latency. In this case the lower range of DASH7 is not an issue anymore. 

Frequency of the peaks are partly determined by the application and/or environment. The impact of these peak loads result in a decrease of the net battery capacity compared to the nominal capacity, and the impact is typically not linear. This can be significant, for example 50% loss in capacity. This can be improved by integrating a supercapacitor in the design which can for a large part take the burden of the peak loads from the batteries, which allows to raise the net capacity, and thus increase the lifetime significantly. 

 

To summarize, it is important to fully understand the pro’s and con’s of a network protocol, there are many tradeoffs to consider and it highly depends on the application what protocol is best suited. The DASH7 Alliance produced a whitepaper “considerations for low-power communication in industrial IoT applications” highlighting technical differences and can be downloaded on the DASH7 Alliance website. (Link)

 

Events

DASH7 Webinar January 21st

 

The DASH7 webinar of January 21st contained 3 parts, all 3 parts are recorded.

  1. Introduction by Michael Andre, president of the DASH7 Alliance to present the 2021 ambitions of the Alliance. PART 1
  2. Use case presentation by Jitter on interiorscapers. PART 2 Use case from Jitter can also be found on our use case section.
  3. Panel discussion with 3 specialist on DASH& and wireless communication. PART 3

To follow the next webinar, please follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for the newsletter.

 

Members, News

Jitter joins the Alliance

Looking closer at the new DASH7 Alliance member “JITTER”

Last month we welcomed Jitter to the DASH7 Alliance, let’s look a bit closer at this interesting company and find out what the partnership brings for both parties.

Jitter is a unique company specialized in quickly realizing high quality hardware and software solutions. They can take a concept from specification to production, allowing their customers to focus on their domain. Jitter covers the full spectrum from idea to product and has helped many startups to bring their ideas to life or developed customized data acquisition and analysis setups.

The success of Jitter highly depends on developing high quality solution with the latest technology available.

The DASH7 Alliance is composed of university researchers, innovative companies, and individuals that want to make a difference in helping people connect wireless devices using battery operated transmitters that operate for multiple years between battery replacements. Joining the DASH7 Alliance helps to build the ecosystem around usage and implementation of the open source protocol.

Jitter has already used the DASH7 open standard in multiple projects, according to Ingmar Jager, co-founder of Jitter, one of the reasons for joining the alliance is to dive deeper into the specification and contribute to the development as well. Additionally, the requirement for industrial IoT solutions is increasing rapidly and the DASH7 Alliance is a good platform to position Jitter in this niche market space.

Beside this, Ingmar expresses that the existing members of the Alliance are very interesting companies and he looks forward to interacting and explore new partnerships with mutual benefits.

On the technology side, DASH7 is a very interesting IoT protocol for developers like Jitter, DASH7 is highly flexible and completely open, making it applicable for many different product solutions.

Ingmar adds that DASH7 distinguishes itself from other protocols with a higher range compared to WIFI, Bluetooth or Zigbee, a higher bit rate compared to LoRaWAN and lower cost compared to 4G / LTE. On top of that it is extremely low power making it easier to come with a low-cost solution.

Michael André, president of the DASH7 Alliance welcomes Jitter and sees it as a real contribution to the ecosystem. A company like Jitter, who has already used the technology, can accelerate global usage and at the same time contribute to the development of the specification going forward.

To summarize, the combination of a wireless network protocol like DASH7 and a solution provider like Jitter are an ideal match to drive the growth of a sustainable ecosystem based on open source software innovation.

Members, News

Crowdscan joins the Alliance

In November Crowdscan has joined the DASH7 Alliance. Crowdscan is a startup from Antwerp, Belgium and is a spin-off of the University of Antwerp and Imec. Based on six years of research at the University of Antwerp and imec, CrowdScan has developed a system to measure crowd densities without using camera images, mobile phone data or other privacy-sensitive information.

They developed a wireless crowd density system that predicts size and density of large crowds. The capacity is measured in terms of humans per m². Their measurement methodology is based on radio frequency signals using #DASH7 to derive crowd size information.

They do not make use of camera images or any type of device that needs to be connected to an individual, this makes it fully anonymous and privacy non-intrusive.

More info on Crowscan and their products can be found on their website.