Collecting Smart Sensor Data at Scale With BLE

Many hazardous process industry environments suffer from data loss or data silos. Assets such as, traditional motors, pumps, and mounted bearings, are all important assets that need monitoring for their health and condition. Deploying condition monitoring sensors is one solution, but how do you ensure all your data is collected across multiple devices and sent via your wireless network to a central location?

It is not uncommon for these such devices to be one-to-one connections with mobile devices that require a person to physically be standing next to the sensor to retrieve the data. This creates a scalability issue and therefore is not suitable for wider condition monitoring analysis.

This is a challenge many process industry sites face and can result in slow response times or delays in critical maintenance.

BLE Offers a Solution

BLE is one such technology that can offer a solution.

Extronics is a proud partner with Cassia Networks, offering the iWAP XN3 Zone 2 hazardous area wireless enclosure powered by Cassia’s X2000 Bluetooth gateways. These gateways can connect multiple devices in your hazardous areas and provide seamless, long range connectivity up to 1Km in line-of-sight applications.

A dedicated IoT gateway: Cassia’s X2000 Bluetooth gateways and IoT Access Controller can be used in conjunction with smart sensors to seamlessly relay critical information about your hazardous area assets. BLE is becoming more commonly used for battery powered sensors and especially in data intensive applications such as vibration sensors where it is not practical to use LoRa due to the low bandwidth and large amounts of data that needs to be transferred to the cloud for analysis. BLE offers a great compromise between low power and a relatively high bandwidth. This means it provides a more power efficient solution than LoRa for data intensive applications such as condition monitoring.

Personnel can remotely monitor assets, eliminating the need to be physically onsite to collect the data from these sensors. Also, since fewer gateways are required to cover the same area, equipment and installation costs are significantly reduced.

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Benefits of BLE

By accurately monitoring machine health, BLE connected smart sensor solutions provide end-users with the data needed to monitor and accurately measure the health of their assets. This allows users to respond and make agile course corrections which can lead to a significant reduction in downtime of critical components and extend the lifespan of these assets and reduce the long-term costs.

If you are interested in learning more about the iWAP XN3 X2000 BLE gateway, please contact a member of our team today on +44 (0)845 277 5000, or email us at info@extronics.com.

About the Author

James Eastwood

Product Manager

James brings experience from engineering and sales into his role as a product manager. His mix of technical understanding and commercial perspective supports the strategic development of our market-leading products.

Published on June 18, 2021

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