Customer story · Energy and IoT
A hardware-in-the-loop test lab for thousands of connected devices
A safer, remotely controlled test lab with a climatic chamber, a standard acceptance test for every release, and WiFi mesh testing for an IoT platform that helps keep the power grid stable.
- Client
- A Swiss energy technology company
- Where
- Switzerland
Challenge
The starting point
The company retrofits electric heaters in people’s homes with IoT devices. Households get better control over their energy use, and the devices together form a virtual power plant that helps energy providers keep the grid stable. That only works if hardware and software behave reliably in thousands of homes at once, and testing it means working with real devices at real voltages.
- Several thousand end users in their own homes, all expecting the system to work the same way.
- Many families of IoT devices from different manufacturers, which made standardisation hard and compatibility problems likely.
- Software components built by several teams, which made integration and quality assurance harder.
- A complex DevOps setup with frequent deployments across a distributed system.
Approach
What we did
Tools
- Microcontrollers, sensors and actuators
- TestRail
- ReqView
- Open-source router firmware
- Rebuilt the hardware test lab to current electrical safety standards for working with high-voltage devices.
- Reorganised the lab around a central pool of IoT devices and heaters, controlled remotely by a central unit, so test setups can be put together on demand.
- Added a custom climatic chamber to simulate temperature and humidity.
- Designed mechatronic and electronic add-ons for the devices, so teams on other continents can operate them, by hand or from automated scripts.
- A standard acceptance test for every major release, covering the IoT hardware and the desktop and mobile apps end to end.
- Assessed the steps towards ISO 9001 certification, and put measures in place in line with ISO 27000.
- Infrastructure for testing WiFi mesh networking between the devices under real-world conditions.
Results
What changed
- The programmable climatic chamber runs daily patterns that reveal unwanted changes on staging.
- Teams on another continent work with the devices directly, which frees up time for the team in Switzerland.
- Acceptance testing covers the whole life of a device: commissioning, operation and decommissioning.
- Requirements managed in ReqView, with traceability from requirement to implementation and better configuration management.
- Open-source router firmware allows deeper analysis in the WiFi mesh tests, including over-the-air firmware updates.
- Written procedures make running and maintaining the lab safer, and there are far fewer test setups with unknown owners or unsafe wiring.
- A pool of devices that engineers book through an app we built, plus a mobile installation for engineering work and customer demos.
- Some heaters in the test installations replaced by air purifiers, to make the office more comfortable to work in.
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