Integration: Williot tags

Explanation on the integration of the Williot tags with the Sensolus solution.

Introduction

Williot is technology company which is specialized in low-cost BLE tags without an internal battery (they call them IoT pixels). The idea is to have tags which are a lot smarter than RFID tags, compliant with BLE infrastructure but at a much lower cost point than classic BLE tags and sensors. The Williot tags do require extensive infrastructure to both power and capture the data. The data can be forwarded to the Sensolus platform to enable all the Sensolus platform capabilities on top of this data.

Use-case (limitations)

Williot is in a way similar to the Sensolus BLE tag tracking solution or an RFID solution. It makes sense in a situation where there is a very large number of assets on a very small number of locations. This is the sweet spot because:

  • The hardware per asset is very low cost.
  • But the infrastructure per scan location is expensive and far from trivial to install and setup correctly.

Specifically, for Williot, one of the main challenges seems to be to be able to energize the assets correctly. If they are not energized they don’t broadcast and they don’t measure temperature.

Solution architecture

The goal is not to give a very complete introduction to the technology but to provide just enough to have a high level understanding.

The picture below shows the key elements of the Williot solution:

Let's go from left to right:

  • The Williot tags are BLE tags in the form of stickers. They are energized externally at short range.
  • The bridges and readers both energy the tags and relay the data by meshing. They need a power plug
  • The gateway relays the data to a cloud platform.
  • The Williot cloud platform is where all the data is aggregated. Compared to the Sensolus platform this is purely a data aggregation and forwarding layer.
  • The data can be forwarded with webhooks to an external platform (in the picture Infux DB, Azure IOT Hub, …)
Note: On the Williot platform, multiple tags can be mapped to a single asset. The idea here is that on an asset like a crate one would place multiple tags to ensure it can be energized and read.