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Introduction: In order to improve air quality and reduce dependence on oil, many governments are sparing no effort to promote the development of electric vehicles, of which the most active is China. China jumped to become the world's largest electric bus market in 2015 due to the government's subsidy policy. The country has also set up a large number of charging stations in major cities so that the electric bus can maintain the normal operation. For the sake of efficiently managing the station equipment and grasping the charging status of each charging pile to ensure safe charging and calculate charging charges, charging station operators need to implement a complete electric bus charging station management system.
In addition to the quality ofsoftware design, the hardware configuration is also very important, which will determine whether the management system at electric bus charging station can achieve the desired results. Taking the example of an electric bus charging station that provides hundreds of parking spaces, system builders may choose to use a server as a host computer to collect the information of all charging piles in the charging station. However, this approach is easy to overload the monitoring host and will further place the system at risk of crash or slowdown. System builders also have the option of using multiple industrial-grade embedded IoT Gateway to work together and distribute system workloads, thereby ensuring system stability. As for the selection of industrial embedded IoT Gateway, users have to consider whether the hardware specifications meet the project and designer requirements, especially in processor, Operating System, I/O interfaces and product size.
Artila’s Product & Advantage: Artila’s Matrix-504 and Matrix-516 are cost-effective, industrial-grade embedded IoT Gateway that provide almost the same functions with slightly different in memory capacity and I/O interfaces. The ARM9 processor used by them can provide high-performance computing. The open source Linux kernel, pre-installed utilities and drivers allow system developers to design the required system functions in a resource-rich open environment, while making system reliable with hard to crash feature.
Offering a wide range of I/O interfaces (including Ethernet, high speed serial, USB and GPIO ports) can easily integrate various peripherals of different protocols to meet the diverse functional requirements of the application system such as building a wired or wireless network, acquiring power meter data, transmitting information to LED marquee, controlling parking lot entrance gate, receiving RFID reader data and so on.
Besides, Matrix series products have UBI File System (Unsorted Block Image File System) enabling them to have better read and write performance. The Data Flash function provides the recovery mechanism in the presence of a fault, enabling Matrix computers to automatically restart when the system is abnormal.
Description: A Shanghai transportation construction group specializes in building electric bus charging stations. The company has also developed a charging station management system to facilitate operators to manage charging stations. During the development process, the company found that the configuration of only one serial server to manage hundreds of parking spaces and handling hundreds of meters of data would place the system at high risk of instability. Therefore, it decided to implement the appropriate industrial-grade embedded IoT Gateway for parking management system and electricity monitoring system separately. The embedded IoT Gateway needed by the company must meet the following requirements: 1. Use high-performance processors to provide sufficient performance for large amounts of data processing; 2. Linux-based development environment to provide a wealth of project development resources; 3. Support multiple RS-485 serial ports to receive sensor and digital meter data; 4. Compact size for mounting in the outdoor control box or the electrical control cabinet at the high/low voltage distribution room. Artila’s products fully meet the needs of this project. The Matrix-516 is responsible for the electricity monitoring system. And the parking management system can install either the Matrix-504 with four serial ports or the Matrix-516 with eight serial ports according to the number of charge points within the charging station. Since both Matrix products are embedded industrial IoT Gateway with Linux-ready arm9, system designers can have the hardware platform featuring high performance, high stability and rich resources. Multiple RS-485 serial ports provide ample interfaces to facilitate system integration with peripherals.
With the low power consumption, fanless design and compact internal structure, Matrix series are small-sized IoT Gateway. They are not only convenient for installation and maintenance, but also are not easy to inhale the dust particles so that the system can run more stable.
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