Build a Pump Monitor for Railway Applications with Zephyr OS - Oliver Völckers & Jonas Remmert

Build a Pump Monitor for Railway Applications with Zephyr OS - Oliver Völckers, BeST Berliner Sensortechnik GmbH & Jonas Remmert, Phytec Messtechnik GmbH

The system uses the nRF9160 SiP to track pump usage data and send it to the cloud via LTE-M/NB-IoT. The pump monitor features temperature, moisture, and pressure sensors, as well as an accelerometer. It performs pattern recognition to evaluate the pumping process and send an encoded assessment to a cloud server via MQTT. The system is being used by German railway operator Deutsche Bahn for monitoring wastewater tanks on high-speed trains. It currently runs maintenance-free for up to three months before battery recharge is needed.

This presentation, based on one given at the IoT-Congress Munich in October 2022, will dive deeper into the electronic and software architecture design. Furthermore it will be shown how Zephyr helped solving many challenges and offered significant advantages over other ecosystems such as vendor-exclusive SDKs. Key design decisions in hardware and firmware during the development of the system will be explained. Many of those design decisions are generally applicable in low power projects.