As we celebrate Earth Day each April, it’s a great opportunity to consider our impact on the planet. The choices we make every day make a difference. Fortunately, we live in an exciting time when technology advances are increasingly able to support better choices — like more fuel-efficient vehicles and renewable energy sourcing. Technology is also behind important improvements in sustainability and reducing environmental impact of enterprises, municipalities and industrial operations.
It’s thrilling to play a role in that innovation. As an IoT solutions company, we partner with systems integrators and organizations around the world to integrate our embedded systems and connectivity solutions into their devices and deployments. From better water management to more efficient street lighting to electric vehicle charging stations, smart transportation and smart grids, our customers and technology partners are driving change.
In this blog post, we showcase just a few of these innovations — the winners of our 2023 Green Tech Awards, held every year in honor of Earth Day and the great work of organizations that are helping us all to reduce our carbon footprint and use our resources more wisely.
The Third Annual Digi Green Tech Customer Innovation Awards
You may have seen our press release announcing the winners of this year’s Digi Green Tech Awards. Here are some additional highlights to showcase these incredible customer innovations.
Summit Envirosolutions is an environmental consulting firm that uses sophisticated information systems to gather and evaluate critical environmental data from groundwater to support better decision making. The company has developed data collection and analysis tools, which rely on in-ground measurement sensors using Digi Connect® Sensor + for wireless connectivity to central servers.
Summit also developed an environmental water supply database and corresponding graphical user interface to enable instantaneous data access, querying, graphing, and GIS visualization, “like an MRI for a water well.” Summit’s analysis tools provide the data to understand well efficiency, water usage and the amount of energy wasted by pumping water further than it needs to go — ultimately supporting better decisions and better water management.
Canada-based Metro Compactor Inc. is a leading waste management and recycling company that helps their customers to proactively manage their waste equipment, ensuring productive and efficient operations. They developed their iSmart IoT system, to gain insights into trash compacting equipment and to optimize routing of their service trucks. Digi’s industrial cellular solutions provide the connectivity for the system.
With iSmart, Metro compactor brings connectivity, visibility, and intelligence to the waste management process. The system tracks how full each compactor is in order to optimize the timing and frequency of truck visits, reduce truck rolls, cut costs, and shrink the carbon footprint of these operations.
P4Q Electronics, a global leader in PV solar tracker controllers, develops and deploys these systems globally to improve the efficiency of solar fields. Suntrack® has been deployed around the world since its launch in 2007 to maximize energy yields, improve the reliability of PV single-axis trackers, and enable customers to remotely monitor, in real-time, over 1,150 PV solar sites worldwide.
Suntrack integrates Digi XBee® Zigbee connectivity solutions in tracker systems attached to the solar panels. Using an algorithm that can pinpoint the sun’s location by date and time as well as weather conditions, Suntrack communicates with the tracker control unit to readjust the solar panel to the best position to optimize its exposure to the sun at any given time.
Taiga Motors develops and markets electric power sports equipment — including electric-powered snowmobiles and personal watercraft — helping to supplant traditional gas-powered systems with much more environmentally friendly solutions. Taiga’s vehicles offer game-changing features, including reliability and connectivity, without sacrificing power or performance.
To prototype and bring their innovations to market, Taiga selected Digi ConnectCore® system-on-modules and Digi XBee® global cellular modules to provide the logic and connectivity for its vehicles. The embedded solutions power the visual dashboard, GPS navigation, and wireless connectivity through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and LTE cellular — features that enable battery and fleet monitoring. Power sports rental companies like the ability to program in power and speed limits, especially for younger drivers, and keep tabs on battery usage and vehicle locations.
Dynamax is a global leader in plant-monitoring instrumentation that provides high-grade sensors and monitoring systems for professional, educational, industrial, governmental, and commercial growers to better manage plant, soil, water, solar, and wind resources.
Growers are constantly trying to determine how much water their plants require, under changing conditions — especially with water resources becoming increasingly challenged. Dynamax incorporated Digi XBee 900 MHz RF solutions and Digi XBee gateways into its SapIP solution, which measures sap flow and helps growers to ensure they are using the right amount of water at the right time.
Digi Remote Manager® plays a key role as well, enabling Dynamax to verify the connectivity of every device on the network at customer installations, as well as perform ongoing monitoring and remote firmware updates. The combined solution helps customers put the right resources into the right plants at the right time — and that means healthier plants and a more productive farm, while supporting sustainability and reducing the impact on the planet
FLO is Canada’s largest electric vehicle (EV) charging network, operating a comprehensive charging ecosystem that fulfills EV drivers’ needs wherever they may be — at home, at work or on the go — by ensuring a consistently simple and seamless experience. The company provides charging hardware and software to serve EV drivers and charging station owners with customer service, access control, payment and energy management.
FLO EV charging stations integrate Digi XBee® modules, as well as Digi industrial cellular gateways and Digi’s embedded system-on-module solutions, providing a highly integrated, connected, and reliable charging solution for on-street and parking garage use cases. Because the stations are cloud-based, they all transmit data back to FLO and the station owners. This allows FLO to monitor every charging station, and even solve problems remotely, reducing service calls.
Digi and FLO will be co-presenting a webinar on the requirements for EV charging stations in covered parking areas on May 10, 2023. Be sure to register!
Green Tech, Sustainability and a Healthier Planet
In honor of Earth Day 2023 and the enormous commitment of developers and organizations worldwide working so hard to make a difference in our stewardship of the planet, we are inspired and honored to see projects like these come to fruition.
Congratulations, to our 2023 Green Tech award winners and other innovators whose work supports the global quest to improve sustainability and control climate change. IoT technology is at the heart of so many game-change initiatives today — from more fuel-efficient transit systems to remote IoT monitoring and management of industrial and agricultural operations that enables fewer truck rolls in fuel-burning vehicles, to detection of environmentally-damaging emissions and much more. We hope you are as inspired as we are!
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