Let’s imagine, you are the operations VP of a company or even the country manager of a European company who needs to get profitability of the operations of your assets. How are you going to optimize the supply chain of your company? Nowadays the cost associated at the information from your supply chain is cost effectiveness. New technologies and networks are appearing into the market with the goal of making the supply chain a very optimized workflow with real-time information. Low power devices with trustable instruments are available in the market for a very interesting price that makes the supply chain a use case where the payback is less than one year.

This is what we are getting from our experience on the supply chain with thethings.iO. Our coldthings: The cold chain monitoring solution and trackthings: the supply chain tracking solution products and helping companies to optimize their cold chain and supply chain and getting the project profitable in less than one year. Does it make sense for your company?

thethings.iO helping supply chains with IoT

The GPS tracking market is currently on the rise and continuing to expand from fleet management towards supply chain and similar use cases. The future of GPS (or non GPS) location trackers looks very promising with the new low power networks appearing in the market. The new trackers that are more trustable, low power and simple are making this expansion viable due the newest low cost connectivity models.

Meet here the 3 main reasons why your company should start tracking your assets on the supply chain investing on Internet of Things technology:

Always moving phylosophy

If your company owns trucks or vans can’t afford a parked or inactive fleet. Without reports that showcase real-time situation of the vehicles and what are they doing, the companies actually don’t have enough information to evaluate the profitableness of a vehicle. It’s important in the 21st century take quick decisions to optimize the workflows of your company. Don’t bring your company on a complex situation without data to take decisions.

The start up cost of location tracking services is very affordable today. At thethings.iO large up front costs are replaced with low fees (depending on your needs CAPEX or OPEX) that enables your companies to get correct data from the situation of your vehicles, if they are moving, parked, at your clients warehouse, following the proposed route, among others. Prices of location trackers have even dropped over the past years, which is one reason more and more businesses are investing in these tracking devices. In addition, the location trackers are becoming more technologically advanced as their prices drop. Different pricing structures are offered by thethings.iO so affordable and fair pricing can be offered to both small and large companies whom may track a few to thousands of assets.

Once you start tracking your supply chain, pallets or vehicles, as more data your collect more information and more data-driven decisions are your going to be able to take to improve the efficiency and productivity of your company. When the productivity of your pallets or vehicles improve it also increase the profitability of your business.

Automatization of the processes

This reason could belong to the Industry 4.0 but it is also applicable at the supply chain industry. The continuous movement of your vehicles and pallets makes complex to follow them, even on a thethings.iO beautiful dashboards under your own brand. The dashboards allow you and your customers to analyze the delivery data improving their satisfaction during the transit process. Nevertheless real-time or daily generated KPIs are much needed in order to get relevant information about the situation of your actives.

It is a must to maximize the hours of your workers and the solution of having vehicles or pallets generating perfect reports from all the supply chain it’s perfectly done through thethings.iO.

Simplicity

thethings.iO provides the most simple enterprise IoT platform. So we make it very simple to connect an end-to-end solution.

We do help companies to install the location trackers to delivery trucks, other vehicles, pallets, boxes or any other assets companies would like to track. The time to market is very easy and quick. Immediately our clients are able to visualize all the data from beautiful and customized dashboard to focus on delivering their customers the best products and experiences. And of course, they can configure their own dashboards for them or their clients in a really simple way. Finally they have the tools to apply business logics on the top of the data, enabling them to generate alarms or other notifications.

Our goal is to enable our clients with a tool which makes their business more trustable and efficient by their clients. The trackthings and coldthings by thethings.iO are essential tools for logistic companies that help them to improve the profitability of their vehicles and to bring assets to destination in perfect conditions. Don’t waste more time and try thethings.iO. Contact us here.

Some customers just contact at thethings.iO because they heard that it’s super simple to use thethings.iO IoT platform to visualize their devices, draw some points in a map or apply business logics on their connected devices. And that’s right! thethings.iO is the most simple IoT platform. Nowadays we are helping hundreds of companies and developers to reduce the time to market of their IoT projects just using thethings.iO IoT solution.

One of the most popular question is how to display data from connected devices on a map. Seriously it’s very simple to do it with thethings.iO IoT platform. Nevertheless, there are tricks to have more fancy maps, it all depends if you have 2, 3 or five minutes 🙂

How to send geolocated data to the IoT platform

First of all, it’s important to understand that thethings.iO has 2 ways to geolocation things.

Locate the device

We call this $geo resource, or also magic resource. This magic resource allows the update of the current thing position in GeoJSON format. GeoJSON and legacy [long, lat] pairs are accepted as valid input value, or you can use the geo attribute: the final value will be saved in GeoJSON format.

Find here the code to send data to locate the device.


{
"values":
[{
"key": "$geo",
"value" : {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [2.154007, 41.390205]
}
},
// OR using legacy [long, lat]
{
"key": "$geo",
"value" : [2.154007, 41.390205]
},
// OR using geo attribute object
{
"key": "$geo",
"value" : null,
"geo" : {
"lat": 41.390205,
"long": 2.154007
}
}]
}


Locate a sensor read in the space and time

Sometimes the GPS reading does not correspond to a sensor read position, so this is the reason why we differentiate among them. Find here the code to send data with this second way to geolocate a device or a sensor read.


{
"values":
[{
"key": "my-geolocated-key",
"value" : 23,
"geo" : {
"lat" : 41.4121132,
"long" : 2.2199454
}
}]
}


How to show things on a map

Now that we have geolocated devices, let’s paint the devices and routes on a map.

It’s simple right? Feel free to register at thethings.iO and contact us if you have any question.

On today’s post we’re going to show you how to connect a Pycom SiPy to thethings.iO. The newest Pycom SiPy supports multiple networks such as Sigfox, Wi-Fi and BLE. The SiPy it’s great for prototyping products for it’s small size, development tools and enormous possibilities. At thethings.iO we worked internally in several projects with the SiPy and we have the first customers prototyping with this board, using thethings.iO IoT platform to collect, visualize and analyze the data.

Configure the Pycom SiPy

Before following the next steps, make sure that you have the required hardware:

• A SiPy with the expansion board.
• A micro USB cable.
• An active internet connection.
• A thethings.iO account. If you still don’t have an account, please register at thethings.iO IoT platform.

Now it’s time to start configuring the device.

• Visit the Pycom Getting Started portal in order to download and configure all the necessary software for your SiPy.

Register the device with Sigfox network. If you need any help with the Sigfox account, feel free to contact us.

• In order to allow the device to send messages throw Sigfox, we need to activate it at the Sigfox backend.
• Please, follow the steps mentioned in the Pycom documentation about Registering a device.

It’s time for flashing the software of the Pycom SiPy.

1. We already have a Github repository with the code that sends the 2 strongest Wi-Fi MAC addresses and the temperature, divided into 2 payloads.
2. Download the repository  and open it with the Atom editor configured with the Pymakr plugin.
3. Plug your Sipy with the computer using the USB port and connect to its wifi network.
4. Having opened the code in the Atom IDE, click on Connect down in the Pymakr plugin.
5. Once the connection is established, Sync the code with the device. Once its send the device will reboot and start running the flashed code.

Connect the Pycom SiPy with thethings.iO IoT platform

Once you have a thethings.iO account, if you don’t have a Sigfox product to use, follow this steps:

1. Enter to your account and click on Things.
2. Press on Create new IoT product.
3. Select Sigfox as Serialisation format.
4. Give a name and choose Akeru for the board.
5. Click on the previously created product and copy the subscription URL.

Now it’s time to register thethings.iO Callback at the Sigfox backend. Once you have copied the previous URL, navigate to the Sigfox backend.

1. Click on your device.
2. Navigate to callbacks.
3. Create a new callback. Make sure you choose DATA as the type of callback and UPLINK as the type of service.
4. Copy the URL inside the URL pattern.

The url should look like this: https://subscription.thethings.io/sgfx/1234/abcdefghijklmn?id={device}&data={data}&radius={radius}&seqNumber={seqNumber}&snr={snr}&time={time}&station={station}&rssi={rssi}&lat={lat}&lng={lng}

Update the sigfox parser at thethings.iO

Back into thethings.iO, move to the cloud code area. You’ll see that a new function called sigfox_parser is created.

Copy the contents of the sigfox_parser of the previous Github repository and make sure you get your GOOGLE API KEY to change it on the code.

Available resources & Dashboard creation

Once the device sends its first messages, the following resources will be shown:

• Geolocation: Google geolocation based on 2 strongest wifi’s.
• Google Accuracy: Accuracy of the previous geolocation.
• Temperature: Temperature taken by the device.

If you also want to add the Sigfox Geolocation service, make sure to read our last post about the Sigfox Geolocation!

Feel free to use thethings.iO widgets in order to create awesome IoT dashboards!

Insights Success has recently published a special issue, “The 10 Most Innovative IoT Solution Providers”. Insights Success is the Best Business Magazine in the world for enterprises. In this issue, they talk about how IoT is changing the world by changing people’s everyday lives. thethings.iO is excited to be featured as one of the top 10 most innovative and prominent IoT solution providers of 2017!

Insights Success features thethings.iO as the most simple enterprise platform. This slogan comes from our ability to allow companies to focus less on the cloud and more on their products. The services we provide are unique and very simple to use. Here at thethings.iO customer satisfaction is our number one priority and that is why we make the adoption of IoT as quick and easy as possible. Despite some challenges, thethings.iO and the IoT market have a very promising future.

Go to http://magazines.insightssuccess.com/The-10-Most-Innovative-Iot-Solution-Providers-June2017/ to find out more about thethings.iO and other innovative IoT solution providers.