Embedded System design for electric bike recharge station

 See the Japanese Translation 

THE SCENARIO:

In a world that is starting to pay more and more attention to the green aspect of its cities and that is focusing on sharing services for its means of transport, the electric bicycles provided by the municipality are gradually becoming a fundamental aspect of today's society. Especially in metropolitan cities, the issues related to pollution and traffic have become challenging to manage and these solutions demonstrate to be an excellent alternative to traditional services. In an increasingly connected planet, it is easy to make citizens accept these new technologies: the profound digitization that we are facing also makes the remote management of these services much easier to use and to rearrange in a scalable and replicable way in realities different from each other. 

From simple stations for charging bicycles, these systems become intelligent and able to provide information about their status in a unified and optimized way.

THE CONTEXT:

To achieve a goal like this, it is essential to supply the city with multiple charging stations, so that they are easily accessible by anyone and can also be reached on foot. The distances between these bicycle parks must be reasonable, but also cover the whole city: their number must, therefore, be sufficient to do so. With such a disposition and large quantity, however, their management cannot be punctual, since this would represent too high a cost in terms of employees, especially as regards large metropolitan cities.

All charging stations must, therefore, be able to automatically transfer the data collected in real-time to a central control room, where data are analyzed and aggregated: from this information, operators can define various statistical purposes, optimize maintenance and catalog an updated global situation. To allow this Internet of Things solution, a gateway is used as an intermediary among the various charging stations located throughout the city and the control center.

These advanced charging systems have Ethernet or cellular communication interfaces to connect to their supervisor, who in turn stores and accesses the collected data through the cloud: this choice proves to be extremely useful also for all maintenance personnel, who can use them quickly.

DAVE Embedded Systems' KEY ROLE:

DAVE Embedded Systems, with its recognized experience and competence, created for this project a product that can be easily integrated with the existing mechanical and electrical systems through peripherals. It is SBC LYNX, a gateway equipped with an ARM Cortex A7 processor with low consumption and capable of withstanding temperatures in a broad range: this allows it to be aligned with the green perspective of the project.

This flexible SBC is also easy to integrate into the receiving system and allows communication even remotely: more information on this is available at the link https://www.dave.eu/products/sbc/freescale/i.mx6-ul-lynx. DAVE Embedded Systems provided substantial support to the customer both from the hardware and software point of view, with all the professionalism that characterizes it.

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER:

The Company deals with the supply of charging stations for electric bicycles, increasing considerably in recent years its business: in particular, they provide metropolitan cities with paid bike-sharing parks through the municipality. Their goal was to evolve simple stations to a city-sized remotely controlled system, employing data transfer and tenders. In DAVE Embedded Systems they found extremely professional help for a product comprising both hardware and software and collaboration of high level and quality.

APPLICATION BLOCK DIAGRAM:

The main features of this project can be summarized in the following application block diagram:

Related products

AXEL Ulite - i.MX6UL

SBC Lynx