From idea to finished product
With the Tinkerforge building blocks you can achieve a broad range of projects easy and fast. In the following you will find a real development story.
Step 1: The idea
At the beginning of every project is an idea.
The goal of EnBW is the development of the intelligent street lamp of tomorrow. With Smart City Light (SM!GHT) they are developing a configurable street light that can be equipped with various lamp types, WiFi hotspot, electric car charging station, emergence call function and comprehensive environment measurments.
Step 2: Rapid prototyping with the Tinkerforge building blocks
During the development phase EnBW was searching for components to implement the project.
Detlef Heil of SM!GHT: "With the Tinkerforge building blocks we found a solution with that we were able to take care of the control of the system and also provide all of the necessary sensors for the environment measurements. The software interfaces of the building blocks allowed us to easily integrate them into our own software backend. Also it was possible to integrate third party components without much effort. We were able to try out new ideas with little effort during this phase, because we could modify software and hardware very fast."
Step 3: From prototype to small batch production
In the first street lamps the Tinkerforge building blocks were incorporated directly. The control of the system was done by the RED Brick, which could show the user interface through the HDMI output on a TFT display. Additional Master Bricks were used to add sensor and IO Bricklets as was needed for the specific customer wishes.
EnBW was able to react to changed requirements by just removing and adding building blocks.
Step 4: Custom product development
The first 100 street lights were used to gather valuable experiences. After that it was easy to specify the necessary properties for a mass market purpose-built product.
Consequently Tinkerforge developed a System for EnBW that was geared to the needs of the established requirements. Since the hard and software development was a customer specific advancement of the previously used building blocks, the development effort could be reduced drastically (compared to normal consulting and engineering costs).
The newly developed SM!GHT system is cost-optimized and it also reduces the production effort.
The finished product
The intelligent street lamp of tomorrow is now available in the form of SM!GHT. This innovative product was made possible by the Tinkerforge building blocks.
No matter if you are an individual maker or part of research facility or company: The Tinkerforge building blocks are always perfect for projects that have to be realized fast and without much hassle.
Did we catch your interest? We will gladly answer your questions at business@tinkerforge.com.