IoT aka Web 2.0 – A Journey into the Past

Situation

A company from the automation technology sector approached TEQneers with the wish to enable central operation and monitoring of geographically distributed controller systems. Everything was to be monitored from a single central point — from simple fill-level notifications of a water tank deep in the woods of a forestry operation, to heating systems at home, to machine fleets in industrial plants. What is briefly called IoT today was, ten years ago, widely referred to as a Web 2.0 solution.

Approach

A web-based solution would provide a location-independent way to monitor and configure these controller systems remotely.

Solution

TEQneers developed a multilingual web portal with a multi-level permission concept for administrators, plant operators, resellers/tradespeople and end customers. In addition to creating network diagrams to visualize the different controller types in a single schematic, the status of the various controllers could be read out and displayed via their internet interfaces. Configuration changes were possible both live and on a scheduled basis. By defining threshold values, alerts were triggered and sent via SMS gateways or e-mail servers.

The Result

Since going live, countless trips to heating/solar systems and industrial plants can still be avoided today. Holiday homes are preheated remotely and on schedule, defined thresholds are monitored from afar and damage to equipment is prevented. In addition, heating installers have the option of passing vouchers on to their end customers and offering the system as resellers.