Advantech at electronica 2018: IoT solutions and more

Learn how to enable an intelligent planet at the world’s leading electronics event (Hall B5, Stand 211)

Advantech today released details of its participation at electronica 2018. The company is showcasing its latest IoT solutions, helping customers and visitors to make the most of this disruptive technologyEindhoven, November 8, 2018 — Advantech, a leader in global intelligent systems (stock symbol: 2395), is participating at the electronica exhibition in Munich this week (13-16 November). Located in Hall B5, Stand 211, the company is showcasing its embedded IoT solutions and services designed to suit a range of industry sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy and smart building.

Effective charging management for electric vehicles is a key topic worldwide at present. Earlier this year the International Energy Agency estimated there would be around 125 million electric cars on the world’s roads by 2030, up from just 3 million today. Smart energy management is therefore a critical enabling factor for this fast-developing market. Advantech is demonstrating at electronica how it successfully cooperates with partners in this technology area by leveraging Mbed Cloud capabilities. The partner in in this application xMight, a smart energy management specialist operating as Tesla’s official partner for charging station installations in northern Taiwan.

Collecting data from smart meters and controlling the power on each individual charging point is an essential part of xMight’s solution. Here, xMight can easily connect its smart meters and EV charging points to the cloud using Advantech’s UBC-330- The Mbed-edge gateway offers interfaces like Modbus, wireless and Ethernet to act as the proxy to Mbed Cloud. With the Modbus interface on one side and IP connectivity on the other, UBC-330 translates requests or responses from Mbed Cloud and forwards them to smart meters and charging points over the Modbus network (and vice versa).

With Mbed Cloud’s secure device management features, xMight can remotely connect and manage its fleet of smart meters through a secure and scalable IoT infrastructure. The company can then build and host its dashboard and analytics programs on top of Advantech’s WISE-PaaS marketplace cloud service. In fact, xMight has also visualised its real-time EV charging site energy management status through the Grafana-based dashboard on WISE-PaaS/EnSaaS.

Advantech’s UBC-330, which is also on display at the show, is a complete RISC with integrated TI Sitara AM3352 Cortex-A8 processor. The device offers two gigabit Ethernet ports, six serial ports, four

GPIs and four GPOs. For industrial applications, the mandatory UART and GPIO features rugged ESD protection and galvanic isolation. UBC-330 is an ideal solution for smart grid, industrial and machinery automation control applications.

Furthermore, on its electronica booth, Advantech is showing plenty of other innovations for integrators, solutions providers and developers alike. For instance, Advantech and software developer Nexiona SRL are showcasing an industry-first stand-alone IoT platform. Built by combining Nexiona’s MIIMETIQ LITE application and Advantech’s ARK-1123 embedded gateway, this stand-alone IoT platform does not exclude delivering data to the cloud but will appeal to industrial customers who are sensitive about their data and wish to introduce IoT technology, in-house, in a manageable, non-disruptive way and at a reasonable price.

This powerful combination introduces two new offerings to Advantech’s product line up. The first is Advantech IoT Proof of Concept. With everything needed ‘in the box’ to capture and display data from any type of industrial sensor, device or machine, Advantech IoT Proof of Concept is an easy and inexpensive way to test the technology – and prove the business value of an IoT project – without disrupting day-to-day operations. The second one is Advantech Edge. Capturing and processing data before delivery to other in-house systems or the cloud, Advantech Edge keeps decision-making close to the action, allowing for local monitoring and immediate detection/response to fault conditions.

At electronica, visitors are encouraged to visit the company’s ‘Smart Building’ area to see how Advantech Edge helps system integrators solve the problem of collecting and combining data from multiple building systems on a common platform. In addition, visitors can see how using MIIMETIQ’s flexible API – and integrating the collected data with the building management system or cloud-based analytics – can facilitate preventative maintenance.

Advantech is also showing its capabilities in prototyping custom solutions (DTOS service), with a product designed for a military chassis. Also demonstrated is the company’s wide range of bespoke medical-certified computing solutions, which includes medical panel PCs/AIOs, medical tablet PCs and fitness computing consoles.

Advantech, an established leader in the industrial IoT space, works as an innovation partner with its customers to help enable an intelligent planet. Visitors to electronica can discover all this for themselves, simply by visiting the Advantech booth in Hall B5.211