BehrTech, the Toronto-based startup in charge of the MIOTY low-power wide-area (LPWA) technolgy, has signed with industrial software company MAJiK Systems, from Ontario, to connect legacy industrial equipment with analytics software.
BehrTech’s MYTHINGS-branded connectivity platform, for managing MIOTY-based sensors and connectivity, has been integrated with MAJiK’s data monitoring and analytics for programmable logic controllers (PLC).
The combined suite is available as a plug-and-play industrial IoT solution for so-called ‘brownfield’ environments, where legacy equipment is already operational. The MAJiK software collects data points (PLC ‘tags’) from industrial machines, and a MYTHINGS transceiver transfers the data to a remote base station.
Data can then be relayed to enterprise cloud platforms or on-premise application engines, such as a manufacturing execution system (MES) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for storage, analytics, and visualisation.
The solution does not require PLC reprogramming and supports multiple cross-vendor PLCs and physical interfaces. BehrTech contends its MIOTY connectivity solution for IoT sensors is more robust than equivalent LPWA technologies from rivals, and works even in hard-to-reach locales.
The Canadian pair have deployed the combined solution at a remote mining site for a large Canadian gold and silver mining company. The company wanted visibility into its ‘heap-leaching’ process, but, due to harsh environmental conditions, Ethernet cabling and legacy wireless solutions were not feasible, they said in a statement.
The new BehrTech-MAJiK solution has enabled the mine to transmit PLC data from a previously isolated and disconnected lime silo around a 300-foot heap leach to an administration building.
It can now monitor lime silo levels in real-time, providing the operational visibility needed to avoid expensive production delays and over-ordering, while improving worker productivity and safety.
Wolfgang Thieme, chief product officer at BehrTech, said: “We are bridging the gap between information technology and operational technology across legacy systems and environments. This PLC integration solution enables you to tap into valuable production data that was previously inaccessible in isolated, closed-loop systems.”
Jared Evans, chief operating officer at MAJiK Systems, said: “Most legacy industrial assets, machines, and facilities are not designed to connect beyond campus networks. This creates huge data silos. Our PLC integration solution enables companies to transform their brownfield plants into digital factories without absorbing the costs and complexities of building an entirely new greenfield plant or reprogramming legacy PLCs.”
MIOTY uses telegram-splitting over ultra-narrowband (TS-UNB) for “last mile” industrial communications. It goes up against the likes of LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT, variously pushed by their backers as springboards for industrial IoT.
BehrTech told Enterprise IoT Insights this week it was opening new sales offices ahead of scheduled as interest in its technology gathers pace. The company’s founder, Albert Behr, said the market for wireless IoT connectivity will be split between LoRaWAN and his own technology.
He said: “This is going to be a two-horse race. There is always an A and a B, for anything that comes to market. Very rarely do you find a monopolistic environment. For every Coke, there’s a Pepsi; for every McDonald’s, there’s a Burger King. And if you look at wireless IoT today, LoRaWAN has really been the only game in town, until now. Sigfox has fallen away; Ingenu has fallen away. NB-IoT has limitations – the telco carrier guys have their own problems, both at a technical level and with the business model.”
BehrTech has just released a new wireless smart sensor for environmental monitoring in industrial IoT setups under its MYTHINGS brand. The new product, called simply ‘MYTHINGS Smart Sensor’, measures acceleration, temperature, humidity, vibration, pressure, and shock and supports mobile data communication up to 120km/hr whether its attached to a moving object or transmitting data to a moving base station, according to BehrTech.
