VIKING, a global provider of marine life-saving equipment, is using a wireless sensor system powered by NeoMesh in its evacuation life raft system.
In case of emergency passengers transfer from a ship to lifeboats via evacuation chutes. But as there is only room in the chute for one person at a time, it has to be cleared before the next person is allowed to go down into the life raft.
Wireless battery powered sensors send a signal to the man at the top of the chute. A red light means it is blocked. When the signal changes to green the chute is clear and ready to transfer another person from the ship into the lifeboat.
Redundancy and power efficiency
One of the reasons the designers of the system chose NeoMesh is because of its ultra low power consumption, combined with redundancy and high reliability. The system is designed with a battery lifetime of min. 7 years, a requirement NeoMesh meets easily. Furthermore, as a 2nd generation mesh network NeoMesh is designed to be the best of both worlds: It delivers the redundancy and reliability which mesh networks are known for, while at the same time providing ultra-low power operation for all the devices in the network, allowing sensors etc. to run for many years on small batteries.
Two basic principles
NeoMesh is applying two basic principles that allow all the nodes to act as Full Functionality Devices, FFD’s, and still maintain very low current consumption; the first principle is synchronization of communication schedules, and the second is to use high baud rate on the radio layer to ensure ultra-short transmission bursts.
The synchronized operation allows all devices to sleep most of the time, and wake up periodically to exchange housekeeping information – and if needed payload data. Because the devices are using a relatively high baud rate on the RF layer, the overall duty cycle of the devices is very low, and will allow them to participate in the network with only a few 10s of micro amperes average current consumption.
