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Automatically integrate sensors and actuators
Auto-E-Connect, a plug and play system from ESERA, to automatically integrate 1-Wire sensors.
Auto-E-Connect is registered as a German and European patent and has been published since early 2021.
Europäisches Patentamt, hier
Plug and Play for IoT sensors
Sensors are a key component of the Internet of Things, and their sales are skyrocketing.
Various market studies predict nearly 20 percent annual market growth over the next few years, with approximately 90 billion dollars in revenue expected worldwide from sensors alone by 2025. However, at the field level, outside of high-end measurement solutions, sensor integration into existing systems often remains primitive.
New sensors typically need to be manually integrated into systems using configuration tools, with sensor types or part numbers and status understood from cryptic sequences of numbers and operating modes set with commands best known from past programming training. Without expensive, trained personnel, things rarely go smoothly.
Similarly, the latest edition of Microsoft's IoT study "IoT Signals" identified "complexity/technical challenges" (38% of respondents) and "budget constraints/personnel resources" (29% of respondents) in companies as the biggest obstacles to the rapid spread of the Internet of Things. User-friendliness and plug-and-play remain scarce in technical software and hardware systems, especially in the low-cost segment. If they existed, specialists would no longer be needed to build large sensor and actuator networks in the field, and rollout times could be shortened to keep costs low, thought Andreas Geisler, CEO of ESERA GmbH from Kaufbeuren. He developed the "Auto-E-Connect" system, which is in the patent process and aims to remove the complexity from building large sensor networks.
Auto-E-Connect is specifically designed for the rollout of systems with very many "slave devices," such as those increasingly used in industrial manufacturing, data centers, or geographically distributed systems in agriculture (keyword: smart farming) and power distribution networks (smart grid).
ESERA 1-Wire Controller, 1-Wire Gateway and 1-Wire ECO
An ESERA 1-Wire controller can address up to 30 sensors, each with up to 4 measured values; larger networks are built by combining multiple bus masters and controllers.
With 1-Wire repeaters, the length of the bus system can also exceed 100 meters.
"A municipal customer uses our 1-Wire system to monitor the network infrastructure at the distribution network level," explains Andreas Geisler. "The condition of substations and cable branch points in the distribution network could previously only be verified through personal inspection.
Now that the distribution network components are equipped with sensors, a glance at the system is enough to confirm the proper condition of the distribution network hardware," Geisler illustrates. He adds, "With the increasing cost pressures on energy suppliers, sensor-supported network monitoring pays for itself very quickly."
The connection to higher-level IT infrastructure is done in such a way that the 1-Wire bus system remains unnoticed by it.
An ESERA 1-Wire controller—potentially even the Raspberry Pi-supported ESERA station—can be used with many software systems like Codesys, IP-Symcon, OpenHAB, FHEM, or NodeRed, and allows the 1-Wire infrastructure to be connected via ModBus, M-Bus, PROFINET, etc., to Siemens PLCs, WAGO systems, and others.