EC: Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform

Network Integration — Wireless Products: B&B Electronics' Wzzard is an easy to use, complete wireless sensor connectivity platform featuring edge decision-making which transcends the traditional SCADA data reporting model and instead enables more efficient, intelligent, reliable and scalable IoT networking. This is a Control Engineering 2015 Engineers’ Choice finalist.

By Control Engineering October 20, 2014

B&B Electronics’ Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform is an easy to use, complete wireless sensor connectivity platform featuring edge decision-making. Edge decision-making transcends traditional SCADA data reporting model and enables more efficient, intelligent, reliable and scalable Internet of Things (IoT) networking. Wzzard was designed to help integrators, VARs and service providers efficiently develop and deploy secure, smart, self-powered IoT applications in remote and demanding environments that can achieve "five nines" (99.999%) uptime.

Unlike traditional SCADA application where sensors and edge devices are simply passive conduits for raw data, edge decision-making enables a more effective network. Using iterative control limits and gateway data aggregation to support applications closer to the network edge, the Wzzard brings this intelligence to the network starting at the sensor, for more responsive, reliable and efficient networks.

The Wzzard platform’s technologies, protocols and hardware work together to reduce the expertise and time it takes for integrators to develop scalable IoT connectivity solutions. They include:

  • Wzzard Intelligent Edge Nodes which connect to industry-standard sensors
  • SmartMesh IP wireless sensing technology which enables auto-forming, self-healing, self-sustaining networks that are also highly scalable.
  • MQTT—a simple messaging transport protocol for M2M/IoT applications over wireless networks
  • B&B’s intelligent Spectre cellular router which serves as the gateway, connecting equipment and devices to the Internet or Intranet over either wired Ethernet or wireless cellular connections.

B&B developed Wzzard to facilitate the coming world of "connected intelligence," where smart machines and systems will collaborate, inform and make decisions on the intelligence gained from each other with little or no human supervision. Humans will program these smart networks, but then the smart networks will have the ability to run efficiently and autonomously, sometimes for years, until there’s data reported that requires human intervention. Wzzard anticipates the low-power requirements of this networking environment.

B&B Electronics, www.bb-elec.com