Shipping cargo by sea is a key facilitator of global commerce. Millions of units are in transit on daily basis, representing a massive investment on behalf of the manufacturer, the seller and the shipping companies. There are a number of risks and unknowns with cargo in transit, ranging from lack of insights for the buyer and seller, to potential negative environmental impact, that leave a lot of opportunity for improvement through greater information sharing. Augmenting cargo in transit with IoT solutions can help sound the alarm when major incidents look likely, reducing the risk of damage, and leading to cost savings and increased peace of mind for all parties.
We've combined Texas Instruments hardware with Temboo's cloud platform to build an IoT solution for freight monitoring that alerts interested parties whenever suspicious changes in motion, humidity and light are detected.
TI LaunchPad
Anaren Zigbee CC2530 BoosterPack
TI SensorHub Booster Pack
PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there’s a problem.
Gmail is Google's popular email service for both consumer and enterprise users. With secure access from any network-connected device, Gmail is a great email solution for almost any project.
We started out by using IoT Mode to generate the TI LaunchPad code that we'd need to generate a PagerDuty event. Events are used to open new PagerDuty incidents, or add data to existing incidents, and we wanted to generate a new event each time we sensed something amiss with the cargo. We used a Temboo Profile to store the static Choreo inputs, allowing us to update them as necessary without altering the code on the TI LaunchPad.
We added code to our LaunchPad to capture and analyze data generated by the TI SensorHub Booster Pack. This code triggers PagerDuty events whenever significant changes in motion, humidity and light are sensed.
Our LaunchPads are loaded with the SensorHub and Zigbee BoosterPacks, and communicate with a Wifi Gateway that sends data to PagerDuty via the ship's satellite connection. PagerDuty takes care of aggregating and dispatching alerts as necessary, meaning that interested parties can be kept informed about cargo while it's in transit, reducing the risk of costly surprises. Using Temboo simplifies this setup and will make this easier to modify and update in the future.
With our system up and running, we used a PagerDuty Choreo to retrieve a daily incident report and distributed that to interested parties using our Gmail Choreos.
This application is designed to send data whenever a suspicious event takes place. One complimentary extension we could make is to send all event data to a remote data store like Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) or Xively - a cloud-based data storage service for IoT applications. With our cargo event data available from a robust, cloud-based service like RDS or Xively, we can build a range of reporting and monitoring tools on top of it, ranging from mobile apps that use our iOS and Android SDKs, to web-based dashboards using of JavaScript SDK.
Along with options for switching out Choreos, or enhancing the application's feature set, we could also reimplement the project using our support for Arduino hardware.
Contact us at hey@temboo.com