Waste Management
Waste Management New Zealand is working to electrify its entire fleet of rubbish and recycling trucks over the next 10 years. They needed deep integration with its electric trucks to be able to monitor their performance, health, and operating statistics over time.
Having worked with SolarNetwork Foundation on other projects, EVisi again recognized that the SolarNetwork platform would provide a solid foundation on which to address Waste Management’s needs, now and into the future. They asked SolarNetwork Foundation to help develop new or enhanced features to meet the needs of the direct vehicle integration needed by the Waste Management project.
The challenge
- integrate with the vehicle CAN network for detailed telemetry data collection
- collect GPS telemetry data for real-time vehicle location tracking
- reliably collect telemetry data even when going in/out of mobile network coverage areas
- derive accurate energy values out of sensors that only provide power data
- flexibly manage the amount of data collected based on different vehicle operating states, to minimize the amount of mobile bandwidth required
The result
Waste Management deployed SolarNode devices wired directly to the electric truck’s CAN Bus network, other sensors, and a GPS receiver. The SolarNode devices use mobile network connectivity to publish the collected telemetry to the SolarNetwork cloud and EVisi cloud services in real time.
EVisi provides electric vehicle telemetry and EV charger management software solutions. By partnering with SolarNetwork Foundation from the initial stages of forming our business, we were able to leverage the SolarNetwork platform to provide the energy data acquisition backbone that powers our business. SNF has been outstanding to work with and has developed EV charger integration modules, electric vehicle data processing modules, and other functions that have enabled EVisi to deliver solutions to its customers that are technically advanced, robust and flexible.
EVisi funded the development of a SolarNode plugin to capture data from a CAN Bus network, released as open source . To help make configuring SolarNode to collect data from CAN Bus, SolarNetwork Foundation developed an extension to the open source KCD XML document format that allows EVisi to define what telemetry should be collected from the vehicle. A SolarNode plugin allows uploading the KCD document and completely configures the necessary CAN Bus data source components.
To help manage the amount of data collected by each vehicle, EVisi realised that the data sources being collected had different data collection frequency needs based on the operational state of the vehicle. For example, when the truck is parked at night, charging, detailed information about GPS location or motor speed are not very important while information about the state of the battery is. When the truck is driving then detailed information about its GPS location and motor characteristics and battery state are all important.
SolarNetwork Foundation helped EVisi make use of the sophisticated filter system available in SolarNode. The resulting filter configuration performs the following functions:
- Detect the operational mode of the vehicle, e.g. driving vs. idle
- Derive virtual meter accumulating energy properties out of instantaneous power properties
- Discard unneeded properties
- Throttle individual data sources based on the operational mode of the vehicle, e.g. slow down GPS location collection when not driving
- Derive delta energy properties out of accumulating energy properties to make integration with the EVisi cloud easier, i.e. report the amount of energy seen since the previous data posting
Because of the rich set of real-time data collected by each vehicle, Waste Management has access to highly informative visualisations that help them monitor the performance of each vehicle and detect faults quickly and easily.
