AAEON and Pelion Device Management lay the foundation for Taiwan’s Smart City

City officials were looking for a reduction in energy costs, infrastructure life cycle cost and greater control over their utilities by deploying IoT nodes to 4,000 lampposts that would sense ambient light levels and attenuate output to reduce energy consumption. A stringent security specification combined with the burden of developing their own RTOS and IoT Platform led AAEON to look for partners who could reduce their time to market and offer a solution that could be easily replicated in other South Asian cities. Pelion Device Management delivered:

Solution

Working with the Pelion resulted in reduced complexity and time taken to design, deploy and manage a city’s device estate. The AAEON lighting node allows Facilities Managers to control Taipei’s IoT-enabled lighting infrastructure from the Pelion Device Management platform by simply plugging into a NEMA socket controller that is found on most streetlights, enabling remote administered applications that instruct lampposts to power up, attenuate, or switch off lights during off-peak hours.

Company and City-Wide Cost Reductions

The Taipei taxpayer benefited from far more than just lower energy bills. The life cycle cost of each lamppost is reduced by relaying live insights that can reduce downtime through preventative maintenance and eradicating the bureaucracy of reporting and processing a failed light.

AAEON was quick to divest the burden of developing a secure RTOS and IoT platform and identified Arm and Pelion as their preferred choice to help their team deploy 4,000 nodes far sooner than developing their own proprietary solution.

AAEON utilized a range of Pelion and Arm-based solutions including: an Arm Cortex M-based STM32F429IEH6 chipset for the MCU, Ublox SARA-N410 NB-IoT communication modules, Arm Mbed OS, Pelion Device Management Platform and Toolchain including Secure Device Access and Mbed Compiler.

Pelion Device Management acted as the single dashboard that takes care of all ongoing city-wide management, allowing remote firmware updates to be administered from a central location and Pelion’s SDA (Secure Device Access) functionality that grants third party Facility Managers and Engineers access at a specific time with the ability to read device data without the option to corrupt or overwrite it.

A Bright Future for Taipei

Pelion’s streamlined provisioning process helped deploy an additional 25,000 IoT devices across the city throughout 2020, forming the backbone of the city’s IoT infrastructure and enabling additional features including: