We often get asked the question: “Why are your devices so much more expensive than the Chinese trackers we see on Amazon?” On the surface the question makes perfect sense. It compares the brand name “GPS” and associates a price with the perception that brand delivers. The basic image is one device pinging a satellite for a quickly triangulated position fix.
We previously addressed this topic in an earlier post relating to our “Pro GPS tracker“, but there is a more general theme> Hannibal Lecter asked Clarice: “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? “
Ask yourself, what is the nature of an industrial grade GPS tracking system? It must be rugged. The materials and the construction must be “fit for purpose.” The tracker gives location and a timestamp. Can you add other sensors? Yes, you can. Does it work indoors? Well, not brilliantly. Does it work fast? Depending on what it can see… are you moving or static, urban or off grid, fast or slow? Are you a delivery rider in NYC or a lumberjack in the Yukon?
You might want to put temperature sensors on the fridges of long distance train buffet cars to keep fresh food longer. You might want to know which driver is using your brand new JCB loader, out of work hours in the Australian outback. You might want to know if a rental vehicle has really bad fuel consumption, or was driven 100 miles out of State, offroad. This is “deep diving” the data flow, meaning piggybacking basic location and time data with other sensors.
In our industry level access control solutions we do not want to send user data to a public cloud server. We want to have control over the security of that data. If we send an unlocking code, we want it private. But maybe you want to share it with the wife? In IoT “data security,” encryption, and who “owns” the data are key questions. Who wants private client information sold on an open market?
GPS is great for outdoor work. But what happens when your poodle goes personal shopping in the mall? Some of our applications combine cellular positioning using WiFi or Bluetooth with GPS (warehouses, containers, pallets). One is perfect outside, the other works well indoors – together you have a solid product.
We look at the functionality a device has to deliver in industrial settings. One of the key things is industrial “noise.” This is not just the constant rattling, banging and clanking of machines, it is electromagnetic properties within this environment. It is the shielding of cables, the positioning of transmitters and receivers, the way enclosures are mounted. The lifetime of some of our insurance industry applications have now passed 10 years, far longer than they were initially designed for. The SIM holder plastic wears out, but the machine itself hums on.
When we are working with fleet vendors, one of the applications of GPS tracking tools is real-time tracking of fleets. When you buy a commercial product from Amazon it is unlikely that the price point includes scaling properties. It is usually a single device tracker. The “scale” element is important. There is no point in building network applications if they cannot be used as scalable nodes. In our water distribution projects, the pressure, flow, and metering data comes to a single point. This monitoring level gives you real-time data across an entire network.
When you aggregate data, the collection and storage costs money. There is no value in storing huge amounts of unsegmented data in the cloud. You can gather the specific data you need using edge computing, or smaller processors nearer to the original data source, to filter out elements. This is where industrial IoT begins to shine, making sense of masses of real-time information, using differently purposed devices or sensors. Imagine data processing as an industrial refinement process.
The convergence between industrial grade tracking tools and the fact that no industry does the same thing in the same way as another means “customization.” To pick an “off the shelf” solution and expect it to work at the level of a precision engineered, structurally sound, industry specific product, is wishful thinking. This is why major brands have stood the test of time and are familiar household names.
