IoT Systems Builds Automation Solutions That Solve Complex Manufacturing Challenges
In-Circuit Testing “Smart Automation”
Using a customized user-friendly “SMART” robot, In-Circuit Testing is automated with supervisory control of test instruments, “SMART” test fixtures & “SMART” circuit board (PCB) feeder. Rapid product changeover is coupled with unlimited scalability to provide a complete solution. A robust operator interface with remote access is provided for an intuitive user experience which is further enhanced by cloud connected automation with SenseQ. High throughput with an outstanding ROI.
Features and Specifications
- Flexible and dynamic DUT routing scheduler
- Test instrumentation brand flexibility
- Configurable software capabilities enable superior performance and throughput
- High-performance handling of a wide range of circuit board sizes and form-factors
- Quick-Change Gripper and ICT Inserts
- Cloud connection with SenseQ
- Low UDT with predictive maintenance
- Guaranteed industry-standard uptime and performance
Why choose AWS and IoT Systems Inc. for IoT deployments?
EASY TO DEPLOY AND MANAGE
- Get started quickly without complex backend infrastructure
- Use MQTT, HTTP 1.1, and WebSockets, and proprietary/ legacy protocols
- Move quickly from ideation to production
SECURE
- Use mutual authentication to ensure that AWS IoT and your devices can confirm each other's identities
- Encrypt all data with TLS 1.2, which is available in a variety of programming languages and operating systems
- AWS Greengrass authenticates and encrypts device data. Data is never exchanged between devices and the cloud without proven identity
SCALABLE
- Start with minimal upfront investment and easily add new devices as you go
- Increase throughput as needed to operate with low latency
- Reliably scale to billions of devices and trillions of messages
If you are ready to start your IoT journey, AWS and IoT Systems Inc. can help you get started
CLOUD DOMAIN EXPERTISE
IoT Systems has the granular AWS knowledge and skills required to quickly take full advantage of the latest evolving AWS cloud technologies.
AWS MANAGEMENT CONSOLE
A web-based interface for accessing and managing all your AWS IoT resources.
AWS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KITS (SDKS)
Kits that take the complexity out of coding custom IoT applications with APIs for AWS services.
AWS STARTER KITS FOR IOT
Physical kits from AWS that are designed to help accelerate development on IoT devices using AWS IoT services.
AWS IOT BUTTON
Helps developers get started with AWS IoT and learn about the features of the platform without the need to write device-specific code.
AWS DEVICE SDKS FOR IOT
Makes it easier to securely connect your devices to AWS using the AWS IoT Device Gateway and Device Shadows.
End-to-end Industrial IoT solution reduces operational cost and complexity
The IoT Systems SenseQ engine ingests equipment and sensor data, organizes it in an inventory service, and visualizes data analytics in simple to use dashboards. Our serverless event-driven architecture scales easily as you add more equipment or sensors. New devices are auto-provisioned with secure certificate-based data encryption from device to cloud. All solutions leverage Open Source and are Open Standards compliant.
IoT Systems Inc. Resources & Info URLs:
Additional Resources & Info:
AWS Advanced Technology Partner
IoT Systems is an Industrial IoT Company focused on integrating the power of Cloud Connected Industrial Systems with the latest automation technologies.
IoT Systems at re:Invent in the AWS Developers Lounge
Visit us at the Sands Expo at The Venetian for a demo or request a one-on-one meeting with a IoT Systems expert and discover how can help your team manage and deploy an Industrial IoT solution.
IoT Systems presentations at re:Invent 2017
Speaker: Soren Peter Nielsen – Chief Software Architect
Automating the provisioning of Greengrass devices
How we have automated the provisioning of Greengrass devices and our data semantics model
- Managing configurations with the IoT Systems Inventory Service through the DeviceShadow
- Managing data semantics via the SensorThings API
- Provisioning
- SensorThings template
- Generation of AWS Thing & credentials
- Creation of configuration
- Creation of required routes & polices
- Storing all binaries in S3 buckets
- Creating script with pre-signed URLs to execute on device to fetch and install binaries
Architectural Review: Deploying Greengrass to support an Industrial Automation Solution
- Examples of the data exhaust from an Automation solution
- How the IoT Systems SenseQ Field Gateway filters data on Field Gateway level
- Example of Aggregating at Greengrass Core level and a Local application
- Example of how SenseQ can use the data passed to the Cloud for analytics
Check Our Solutions
SenseQ enables the hidden potential of your connected industrial equipment through a powerful Web dashboard you can access anytime, anywhere, on any device.
In-Circuit Testing “Smart Automation”
Using a customized user-friendly “SMART” robot, In-Circuit Testing is automated with supervisory control of test instruments, “SMART” test fixtures & “SMART” circuit board (PCB) feeder. Rapid product changeover is coupled with unlimited scalability to provide a complete solution. A robust operator interface with remote access is provided for an intuitive user experience which is further enhanced by cloud connected automation with SenseQ. High throughput with an outstanding ROI.
"As our company scaled to meet the demands of larger distributed customers we knew that integrating the information collected by smart sensors was going to be very time consuming and expensive. We had to look for a cost-effective solution fast.”
Kevin Stoddard ©
Challenge
InControl Engineering is an innovative solutions company specializing in the design and integration of smart sensors for manufacturing in numerous industries.
In 2016, Kevin Stoddard, a managing partner, had a problem.
InControl’s customers required sensors on equipment distributed across multiple manufacturing sites globally.
To accomplish this, InControl needed a cost-effective solution fast.
They also needed this solution to be intuitive for the equipment owners, highly secure, and broadly capable of delivering custom analytics to clients around the world.
Solution
Figure 1: SenseQ - How It Works.
To address the customer’s needs, IoT Systems created a serverless infrastructure and dashboard to remotely monitor vacuum pumps on-site at a semiconductor customer and deliver that valuable data and alerts to the equipment owners.
Our SenseQ gateway and SenseQ cloud infrastructure were integrated with InControl’s Smart Sensors to securely and reliably transfer data from behind an enterprise firewall to the cloud via Amazon Web Services (see Figure 1).
Additionally, SenseQ provides quick, secure device provisioning, and scales easily for new equipment.
The solution also includes dynamic thresholds for sensor and alarm types, defined by the SenseQ Engine, to differentiate routine warnings from critical failures.
Finally, to meet changing customer needs, we built a configurable dashboard template with visualized equipment data.
Equipment owners and operators can use the dashboard from their smartphone, tablet, or PC and receive alarms via in-dashboard notifications, email, or SMS.
The Results
By delivering unprecedented access to actionable insights, IoT Systems has improved situational awareness of predictive maintenance requirements for InControl and their clients, and has lowered costs for all parties.
IoT Systems’ products securely and reliably transmit data between equipment, sensors, and the equipment owners’ smartphone to limit unplanned downtime.
With IoT Systems’ infrastructure to support them, our clients can be more efficient and innovative than ever before.
"As our company scaled to meet the demands of larger distributed customers we knew that integrating the information collected by smart sensors was going to be very time consuming and expensive. We had to look for a cost-effective solution fast.”
Kevin Stoddard
Challenge
InControl Engineering is an innovative solutions company specializing in the design and integration of smart sensors for manufacturing in numerous industries.
In 2016, Kevin Stoddard, a managing partner, had a problem.
InControl’s customers required sensors on equipment distributed across multiple manufacturing sites globally.
To accomplish this, InControl needed a cost-effective solution fast.
They also needed this solution to be intuitive for the equipment owners, highly secure, and broadly capable of delivering custom analytics to clients around the world.
Solution
Figure 1: SenseQ - How It Works.
To address the customer’s needs, IoT Systems utilized the AWS Serverless tools such as Lamba and API Gateway to create the infrastructure and dashboard to remotely monitor vacuum pumps on-site at a semiconductor customer and deliver that valuable data and alerts to the equipment owners.
Our SenseQ gateway and SenseQ cloud infrastructure were integrated with InControl’s Smart Sensors to securely and reliably transfer data from behind an enterprise firewall to the cloud via the AWS IoT Service (see Figure 1).
Additionally, SenseQ provides quick, secure device provisioning, and scales easily for new equipment.
The solution also includes dynamic thresholds for sensor and alarm types, defined by the SenseQ Engine, to differentiate routine warnings from critical failures.
Finally, to meet changing customer needs, we built a configurable dashboard template with visualized equipment data.
Equipment owners and operators can use the dashboard from their smartphone, tablet, or PC and receive alarms via in-dashboard notifications, email, or SMS – delivered via AWS Simple Email Service and AWS Simple Notification Service.
The Results
By delivering unprecedented access to actionable insights, IoT Systems has improved situational awareness of predictive maintenance requirements for InControl and their clients, and has lowered costs for all parties.
IoT Systems’ products securely and reliably transmit data between equipment, sensors, and the equipment owners’ smartphone to limit unplanned downtime.
With IoT Systems’ infrastructure to support them, our clients can be more efficient and innovative than ever before.
"My engineers and I had to go to a subbasement equipment room of the fab on a regular schedule to check the vacuum pumps, and it took a lot of flexibility out of my day and theirs. We couldn’t always make it to the equipment room if there was other work to be done that day. We need those pumps up; if a wafer production scrap event happens, it kills our yield targets. The SenseQ IIoT solution pushed all the data we needed on the pumps, with all the visualizations we needed, to our smartphones and desktops. It also warns us when pumps are failing or about to fail. And most importantly, it leaves us free to look over the data so we can plan our predictive maintenance much more efficiently.”
Semiconductor Fab Senior Equipment Manager
Equipment Owners’ Challenge
One of IoT Systems’ clients needed a system to monitor vacuum pumps and provide engineers with actionable data in real time, at any time, from anywhere, and on any device.
Due to the need to keep costs low and production high, semiconductor manufacturing facilities seek to closely monitor product yield and tool uptime, especially as they scale up operations.
Vacuum pumps are a critical component of vertical furnaces that operate at low pressure. Vacuum pressure must be monitored continuously during process runs to achieve desired results. Since the gases used in low pressure furnace processes can be very dirty, the vacuum pumps need to be monitored and serviced to prevent failures.
If a pump were to fail during production, it would lead to a scrap event, costing the client substantial revenue loss, delaying production with unplanned downtime, and increasing overall manufacturing costs.
Equipment engineers could only check the pumps by walking to the sub fab, or space below the processing floor where the pumps operate, and looking at them directly. Since this was very time consuming, they did not always check the pumps’ performances as needed.
Solution
Figure 1: SenseQ - How It Works.
IoT Systems installed the SenseQ edge computing solution. SenseQ, which is built using the latest Amazon Web Services (AWS) , monitors the data coming from the sensors on the pump and sends alarms to managers via email or SMS when the data indicates that the pump is about to fail.
SenseQ’s dashboard, which works on equipment owners’ and managers’ smartphones, tablets, and PCs, also allows the visualization of data from multiple pumps over longer periods of time without physical inspections or manual data entries. The dashboard utilizes the functionality of the AWS managed Elasticsearch service to make previously invisible information visible. Thereby, SenseQ makes it easier to set benchmarks and evaluate historical performance.
The Results
Soon after installation, when a vacuum pump was about to fail, SenseQ sent an alarm via email to managers and equipment owners, allowing them to shut down the furnace, service the pump, and restart operations without a scrap event occurring.
IoT Systems’ solution has enabled the client’s managers to conduct predictive maintenance with quicker response times, and consequently lower risks of scrap events, than ever before. Further, the client’s managers can more efficiently predict the capabilities and limitations of their vacuum pumps by evaluating performance over elapsed time.
As a result, the client’s managers are better positioned to meet operational demands and yield targets, and to scale their operations more efficiently.
White Paper
SenseQ Security Overview
IoT Systems builds custom Industrial IoT solutions, while providing the security measures and compliance certifications organizations require. With a multi-layered approach that combines a robust back-end infrastructure with a customizable set of policies, we provide businesses a powerful solution that can be tailored to their unique needs.
SenseQ Edge
- SenseQ Edge was developed to serve firms that need their equipment data to stay on premises for security reasons, the fastest responses possible to equipment issues, or IIoT services that function with intermittent or no Internet connectivity.
- SenseQ Edge was developed with SensorThings API to ensure the greatest possible versatility in developing equipment monitoring solutions.
- SenseQ Edge runs on AWS Greengrass, Amazon Web Services’ industry-leading edge compute platform.
- SenseQ Edge can connect automatically to the AWS Cloud when internet connectivity is available, allowing our clients to perform resource-intensive tasks including big data analytics.
AWS Greengrass
What is AWS Greengrass?
AWS Greengrass is an edge processing service created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) which enables IoT device management independent of a remote cloud. While typical AWS-based IoT device management happens in the AWS cloud, some firms have additional considerations that require some or all device management to be outside the cloud. AWS Greengrass allows local servers to run AWS Lambda, the AWS cloud’s “serverless” compute service, and thus manage IoT devices with at least 128 MB of memory and a 1+ GHz x86 or ARM CPU as if those servers were the AWS cloud.
Why does IoT Systems use AWS Greengrass?
Reliability
For many firms, IoT device management must never be interrupted. IoT Systems’ solutions for those firms can include typical AWS-based management with AWS Greengrass-powered servers as backups, meaning that in the unlikely event of an AWS service outage, business can continue without skipping a beat.
Speed
When firms need to capture and use big data in real time, some processes need local management. IoT Systems’ AWS Greengrass-based solutions allows local network connections between IoT device owners and their devices. This ensures device owners will always have the fastest possible access to their valuable, actionable data.
Data Protection
Often, firms’ IoT devices transmit sensitive data that, due to professional, ethical, or legal factors, cannot be stored off-site. By using AWS Greengrass to enable local storage, IoT Systems’ solutions enable these firms to maintain and grow their operations in Industry 4.0 activities.
SensorThings API
A broad overview of what SensorThings is, how it works, and why IoT Systems, Inc. uses it.
What is SensorThings?
SensorThings is an application programming interface (API) developed in 2015 by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to manage sensors and actuators in the Internet of Things (IoT).
The OGC, founded in 1994, is a non-profit that formulates open standards and best practices for geospatial data, data sharing, geographic information system (GIS) data processing, and IoT devices.
In 2005, with new developments in sensor technology and wireless Internet connectivity making it possible to place more sensors in more remote locations than ever before, the OGC developed Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards to enable sensor and Web-based application interoperability. The SensorThings API is the OGC’s latest expansion of SWE standards in sensor and actuator management.
In order to manage sensors and actuators, the SensorThings API needs a server implementation for use with Web services (e.g. Amazon Web Services) and with on-premises server hardware.
The Fraunhofer Institute, an applied science research organization founded in 1949 in Germany, has built an open source server implementation of SensorThings to scale their work for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and has released that implementation for public use. The Fraunhofer IOSB SensorThingsServer is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0.
Supporting and implementing SensorThings allows IoT Systems, Inc.’s partners to monitor, control, and scale devices with unprecedented ease.
How does SensorThings work?
The SensorThings API is a two-part system (see Figure 1):
I. Sensing: This retrieves and manages time-series data (periodical) and state data (event-specific) from sensors, sending them to the cloud in lightweight MQTT payloads.
II. Tasking: This allows logic engines and dashboards to maintain remote control of devices.
Figure 1: How Sensors, Actuators, and Applications Interact in the SensorThings API.
Why does IoT Systems, Inc. use the SensorThings API?
- SensorThings allows for scalability without investing unnecessarily in the development and hardware needed to create individualized solutions for every sensor and actuator.
- SensorThings can manage IIoT devices in the AWS cloud or by edge computing (processing data at local servers powered by AWS Greengrass), allowing partners to customize their IIoT management strategy.
- SensorThings is the culmination of the OGC’s 23 years of experience formulating open standards and best practices for the remote collection and use of data, as well as the API of choice for one of the most respected applied research science organizations in the world’s expansion into the Internet of Things. As such, we believe it is the most robust API for ourselves and our partners in Industry 4.0.
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