How an Electronic Tools Company Launched Their First Smart Product
With a decade of experience in end-to-end IoT solutions and IoT services, read how Thinxtream® used Espressif™, AWS®, Android™ and iOS® to create a smart connected product solution with cloud connectivity and mobile provisioning.
The Business Goal
Traditional, old economy businesses with standalone, low-cost devices — such as our customer, who manufactured electronic tools — are responding to the competitive challenge posed by new-age businesses leveraging digital technologies.
Budget goals demanded that the digital transformation of their traditional products occur rapidly. This is not easy for several businesses. While they possessed the domain knowledge of their business and products, they found it difficult to assimilate the various IoT technologies required to launch a complete, smart connected product solution on time and within budget.
Working with Thinxtream, an experienced end-to-end IoT solutions partner, provided the customer with a rapid, cost-effective rollout of an IoT-based, next-generation smart connected product solution with cloud connectivity and mobile provisioning.
Top IoT Challenges
- Real-time alerts to users
- Optimum use of computing resources
- Low power usage requirement
- Fallback and recovery
- Scale up to 1 million devices
- Small footprint device
- Testing for scale
Key Highlights
- Single-click device deployment
- Registration and provisioning from mobile apps
- Real-time, fully configurable email alerts on problem detection
- On-demand secure cloud connection over Wi-Fi®
- Remote device status monitoring
- OTA device firmware upgrades
- Usage analytics and insights
The IoT Solution
Thinxtream delivered a complete IoT solution spanning device firmware, cloud backend and mobile applications, designed to scale to millions of connected devices.
- Firmware: Espressif ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller with full TCP/IP stack
- Cloud platform: AWS®
- Cloud services: Amazon EC2®, AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon® Simple Email Service, Amazon Elastic Block Store, AWS Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon CloudWatch®
- Cloud data services: Amazon RDS®
- UI: Native Android™, Apple® Objective-C®
- Programming: Java® web services, Embedded C
- Client OS: Android and iOS®
The architecture used elastic load balancing and auto scaling to handle variable demand, with CloudWatch for monitoring, SES for real-time configurable email alerts, and RDS for persistent device and user data storage.
The solution combined embedded firmware, cloud infrastructure and mobile applications to support device provisioning, secure connectivity, remote monitoring and firmware updates across the connected product lifecycle.
The Results
The electronic tools company leveraged Thinxtream's end-to-end IoT services to build an IoT solution for their first smart connected product, and launched it, gaining brand recognition for technical innovation.
Secure connectivity and instant alert features improved access to the product. Mobile provisioning and configuration improved usability. OTA capability enabled the smart product to evolve and improve with use.
Leveraging reference architectures and best practices from AWS resulted in fast turnaround and a stable and repeatable development and deployment process.
Thinxtream's IoT solution architecture established the foundation for future implementations and innovation for the smart product by the customer.
"We built an entire IoT based, smart connected product solution for our customer, leveraging our embedded, cloud and mobile expertise." — Teck-Lee Low, Executive Director, Thinxtream
