Lessons learned from 18 years of deploying IoT solutions in the field

K. Rangarajan, MD & CEO, Sixth Energy Technologies: 18 years of deploying IoT solutions in some of the harshest climate and geopolitical environments have enabled our products to be robust and dependable. While ease of deployment and integration is essential, reliability plays an extremely important role in remote monitoring systems. Sixth Energy’s focus on building dependable and smart solutions have aided our customers to deploy our solutions and get value.

All products have two parts — technology and engineering. Most companies tend to focus on building technology, which is why similar products with minor variations constantly flood the market. Sixth Energy, however, gives equal importance to engineering.

Let’s take the example of a simple generator control solution. Generator control consists of the controller, a generator and a relay to connect the two. Now, how would you connect these onsite? What is normally done is to have the controller at a central location and a relay is mounted in a box or on a wall near the generator. A pair of wire is connected to operate the relay from the digital output of the controller. Even though it seems simple, it comes with a whole lot of problems.

Firstly, generator alarms need to be checked before starting the generator. Otherwise, it could lead to catastrophic situations at site. If you connect all the generator alarms to the central controller, you will have a bundle of wires running from the generator to the central controller. Secondly, if the digital output wire from the controller to the relay is disconnected, there will be no way of knowing it remotely. Thirdly, there will be multiple cables running across the site.

On the other hand, Sixth Energy follows an all-digital, distributed approach. An independent generator control module with a microcontroller, alarm sensing system, control relay as well as a digital communication interface is used to connect to the generator. The central controller issues commands over a protocol interface to the generator control module. The generator control module ensures that there are no alarms in the generator before starting the generator. If any alarm is sensed, the generator is shutdown to avoid catastrophic results. If the communication cable is disconnected between the central controller and the generator controller module, it is immediately known at the central location. A bundle of wires is replaced with a single cable between the central controller and the generator control module. A distributed and all-digital approach reduces cabling at site and increases reliability. Our design prioritises safety and efficiency, ensuring that our solution is easy to integrate and maintain.

The other major integration nightmare is usually between the sites and the central management software. We have been part of projects where the site equipment vendors say that data has been sent from the site while the central software provider says that the data was not received. With an end-to-end integrated system, this issue is also taken care of. With open interfaces, our central data, image and video ingestion, alarm management and data analytics software can be integrated with customer’s existing operation support systems and other computing applications that are already part of customer’s operations set up.

With our set of digitisation software modules (site access key management system, field engineer management system, TT systems etc.), a unified platform can be provided for digitisation of operations.