At the start of November, our SimpleHW team announced an international project of coffee machine monitoring.

The monitoring devices were sent to all the Sigfox operators around the world. Now the devices are reporting the vibration/coffee preparation on their coffee machines. Among participants, there are already more than 45 Sigfox operators and their offices.

All the results are visualized and displayed in real-time on the web and in iPhone and Android apps.
 See the public dashboard of the IO Frog platform here.

All the greeting to the participants of the project! More and more devices get activated and monitored every day!

4 reasons why we see a great business case behind

Coffee bean suppliers want to lock customers into their brands. So by giving away SimplePack free of charge that monitors the consumption, they can deliver the right amount at the right time

The office manager can monitor real coffee consumption so that coffee supplies are not (e.g. by cleaning services or even staff!)

The duration of vibrations can distinguish between coffee preparation or the cleaning program so the office manager can be notified if the machine is not maintained properly

There is a button that can display the Coffee bean brand and this can serve as a re-ordering button.

How does it work?

The vibration monitoring works in such a way that we sample vibration each second, we count 0 and 1 within 255 seconds and form a value of one byte. We combine 10 bytes together into one Sigfox message. So we send a message every 255×10 seconds that is each 42.5 minutes.  In case there is no vibration (e.g. during the night) we don’t send any message in order to save Sigfox messages and battery life.

We can say precisely how many seconds the machine was working and the lowest “resolution” in this case is 255 secs. The sensing period can be shortened or prolonged via a downlink for different use cases.

How else can the "Monitor me" mode can be used?

This ‘Monitor me’ mode can be used for office chair monitoring, fridge compressor monitoring, any engine monitoring.

The sampling intervals can be shortened or prolonged very simply by downlink

Battery life with different versions of SimplePack

SimplePack 2.0 ~ 1 year battery life

SimplePack 4.0 Plus ~ 3 years battery life

And with SimplePack 4.0 Plus Advanced we are aiming at ~ 5 years battery life

Your device will be in a "Trace me" mode

Your device will be in ‘Trace me’ mode to trace the journey from us to you. As soon as it arrives we remotely switch it to ‘Monitor me’ mode ourselves. So, the only thing you need to do is to attach it to the machine using the double-sided sticky tape provided and send us the picture

Let's promote it together!

You can promote the project on your social media networks if you will. We will provide the links as soon as we have a substantial amount of devices installed.