Next up in our product spotlight series, we review Sentinel Logger.  When we set out on our development journey of a complimentary product for SENTRY, it was immediately clear the market needed disruption in terms of logger innovation.  Large-scale logger deployments were riddled with flaws.  While many issues caught our attention, we quickly discovered the basis of their feedback always came back to the following question: How do I ensure I am receiving my temperature data in a timely manner?

 

The majority of the choices on the market were limited to only being able to retrieve the data via USB plugin.  This is clearly a bottleneck that relies on human intervention to mitigate.  To remove the human bottleneck, we identified Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE as the technology to utilize.  At the time, we had tens of thousands of SENTRY 500s deployed globally.  Each unit in the field was already equipped with a Bluetooth module to serve as a gateway.  This allowed our customers to begin deploying sentinel loggers without any heavy infrastructure costs.

 

As an industry leader in BLE logging solutions, we had to correct false perceptions around BLE.  Consumers anticipated the experience to be akin to an iPhone pairing to a BLE speaker.  Firstly, there is no requirement to pair our SENTRY to a Sentinel.  The SENTRY autonomously will read any Sentinel in its vicinity.  Secondly, our robust firmware and hardware took the consumer BLE experience and turned it on its head.  The SENTRY could read Sentinels from over 300 meters away enabling timely receipt of data.  Instead of the end user having to collect the package, remove the logger, and download the report, the data was already being delivered.

 

An unanticipated benefit the Sentinel solution provided was a time stamp of when the consignment arrived vs when it was officially POD’d.  For example, the Sentinel would begin reading data once the delivery vehicle reached the dock doors.  While this is clearly a major benefit to receive the data without retrieving the logger, it also created an audit trail of when the device arrived at the facility vs when the logistic service provider checked it in.

 

As we mapped out our customers supply chains, we began installing SENTRYs at their key depots. Sentinels began to flow through their hubs offloading millions of data points in the matter of days.  However, our goal was always to ensure minimal downtime.  We wanted the logger to be offloading sensor data even more quickly.  This was the foundation of building the worlds largest gateway network in the world.  We now have SENTRYs at nearly 90% of the worlds airports.  Their sole purpose is to retrieve data from Sentinel tags.  If you would like to read more about this, please check out this blog The Development of the Worlds Largest IoT Gateway Network

 

The Sentinel logger is a cost-effective tool to gather sensor data.  We have built additional technologies, including our network of gateways, into our solutions that facilitate a near real time experience.  I will leave you with a quote from one of users who has been deploying the logger for over two years.

 

“OnAsset has a complex yet eloquent solution set. Once we were able to place SENTRY gateways at our key locations, the Sentinel logger was the perfect tool to embed in our containers to capture rich sensor data with no human intervention. Once the specimen arrives, the data automatically uploads to our proprietary software. For shipments requiring real time location data, we can easily pivot to a SENTRY or even their new product the Sentinel 100 S." stated Michael Larkins