Clever concrete compute

Lately, well-crafted connected devices with wireless sensors and reliable, low-cost compute hardware have been revolutionising many “unconnected” industries, services, and applications. One such industry and service is the delivery of pre-mixed concrete.

Image from giatecscientific.com

A Canadian customer of ours called Giatec recently launched a unique and very clever product called MixPilot. MixPilot gets mounted to concrete delivery trucks and, through the use of sensors and algorithms, can monitor various aspects of concrete being delivered, including a property known as its slump. This is done to ensure the quality of the concrete and give the fleet operators more visibility into the trucks and their payload, as well as bringing other new operational benefits. Part of their product’s charm is that it’s easy to install on the truck: it’s “set and forget”, meaning it doesn’t require much maintenance.

Slump is a measurement of how well concrete flows when it’s poured. It is important for the slump to be in the right range when the concrete is poured into a form or mould, as otherwise it might not flow correctly to fill the volume, leaving voids. Bad news if you want a structurally sound construction.

To deliver MixPilot, Giatec built a highly reliable wireless gateway based on our Compute Module 4 and paired it with two custom sensors that wirelessly send their sensor readings back to the gateway, where the data is processed and the concrete payload’s status is displayed to the truck operator. The gateway is then connected to Giatec’s cloud via cellular, allowing for further data processing as well as providing the end customer with a cloud console to enable useful features, such as alerts and fleet-wide stats.

Our line of Compute Modules is ideal for this type of “edge compute” application for all lots of reasons:

• Low power: allows great levels of compute without needing to worry about heat
• Flexible: Giatec engineered a custom Compute Module 4 carrier board that has all the interface hardware and cellular radios needed to enable their product
• Great Raspberry Pi software: Giatec’s talented engineers were able to develop and release the product very quickly, in part thanks to our robust Raspberry Pi OS
• Secure: Compute Module 4 has the ability to run secure software and supports secure boot, which is provisioned by our handy tools on the customer’s production line
• Pre-certified wireless: CM4 optionally includes dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so you can effortlessly enable wireless comms without a costly development or certification process
• Cost-optimised: CM4 is great value and has 32 SKUs to choose from, so you can scale up or down the RAM, storage, and wireless options to best suit your application
• Long lifetime: Giatec and other customers can rely on CM4 to be available from Raspberry Pi until at least January 2034

Learn more about MixPilot on Giatec’s website.

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