Chapter 6. Weather Monitoring Using BLE in Warehouses
Creativity is just connecting things.
In this chapter, we shall build a warehouse monitoring system, which is an Industrial grade solution and will help us in better understanding the roots of the foundations of IoT based on Bluetooth Low Energy via the following topics:
- Problem Statement and Solution Design
- Temperature and Humidity Sensors
- Designing the Monitoring App
- Practical Applications
Through the earlier mentioned topics, on a very high level, we shall attempt to understand why there is a need for such a solution, eventually translating that need into a problem statement and finally attempting to address the problem statement by proposing a solution design. This chapter will also introduce you to a real-life scenario, which can be addressed by a solution designed around IoT and BLE. Apart from solution design, it will also augment your pre-existing skill set from the previous chapters by adding the knowledge of some more...
Problem Statement and Solution Design
While designing any system, it is imperative to understand the following:
- Which problem does the system address?
- How do the various individual parts in the system communicate with each other or how does the flow of data take place in the system?
Not to bog you down with the details, we shall only elaborate on the essential parts and design the bare minimum system so that you can get an idea of data flow and overall system design. Let's understand the problem at hand first, by eventually coming up with a problem statement.
Apart from several other items, warehouses are also used for storing vegetables, food, and medicines. Specifically for these items, it is crucial to maintain a correct balance of the temperature and humidity; otherwise, there is a risk of major losses. Hence, a warehouse deploys specially designed monitoring systems, which continuously monitor the climate inside a warehouse. If anything goes awry, then these systems are capable of raising...
Temperature and Humidity Sensors
There are already temperature and humidity sensors commercially available in the market for both industrial and home solutions.
One of the advantages about choosing a complete sensor solution rather than individual and standalone sensors is that sensor-based solutions are well packaged and come with extensive documentation and support. For example, the following is a TEMPERATURE-HUMIDITY SENSOR + EXTRAS known as DHT22:
Figure 2: DHT22 Temperature and humidity sensor; source: www.adafruit.com
This is a low cost and basic temperature and humidity sensor, which is great for learning about sensors and their internals. However, if you are looking forward to building a complete...
Designing the Monitoring App
The basic idea behind our setup is based on the system design we described in the Solution Design section previously. Our app behaves as the BLE + Wi-Fi Hub, reading data directly from the sensors planted on store/warehouse shelves and uploads it to the backend (Firebase) for monitoring purposes.
A Note - We would be implementing a lot of functionality in this section. Please don't let that scare you. As a visual aid to give you a better understanding of the code that you would be implementing in this section, we have added a flowchart which outlines the flow of our App, towards the end of this section. Once you have implemented the code, we request you to review your code with the flowchart serving as a guidance tool. This will give you a much better understanding of the overall functionality of the App.
Following are the pre-requisites for this section,
Android:
- Latest Android Studio
- A Latest Android Device (Preferable Samsung Galaxy S8, since it has support for...
Apart from warehouse climate monitoring, we shall discuss other real-life use cases of temperature and humidity Bluetooth Low Energy data loggers to give you a better understanding of the domains, where similar solutions to the one we discussed earlier can be applied with minimal changes.
Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo uses Bluetooth Low Energy temperature and Humidity Data loggers to manage the indoor climate in the museum from preserving antique pieces of art, in a similar fashion as depicted in the following figure:
Figure 15: Wireless climate monitoring in museums; source: www.onsetcomp.com
This museum stores Japanese artefacts such as Japanese paintings, calligraphy, and pottery for public exhibitions.
These artefacts, specifically paintings, are rare antiques, drawn in the 16th Century in Japan. Preservation...
If you arrive here after completing all the code samples, then give yourself a solid pat on the back, since we covered a really wide ground in this chapter by implementing a detailed and commercially viable IoT solution built over Bluetooth Low Energy. This chapter was significantly a notch up from the others considering the complexity involved and we do hope that after completing it you already feel promoted to the next level with all the knowledge we gained in this chapter.
We are very curious to know that what you will build next with all this new knowledge at hand. Feel free to drop us a line in case you come up with a cool solution revolving around BLE, Sensors, and IoT.
With this, we now move on to the next chapter, which attempts to explore the future of Bluetooth Low Energy and eventually IoT.
