Electric Trailer Telematics with Tableau Dashboards
Case Studies / Thermo King
Thermo King
Thermo King is a global leader in transport temperature control solutions, providing refrigeration systems for trailers, trucks, buses, and rail applications.
What problem did you solve?
We required a solution that allowed us to combine two separate telematics data streams with differing levels of data fidelity. The Thermo King TracKing A® telematics side provided us with our standard Transport Refrigeration Unit (TRU) performance data. The CANedge side was logging the complete CAN bus of our prototype battery system that provided 3-phase power to the TRU.
How did you solve it?
We deploy the CANedge3 in our evolve trailers to collect raw CAN data via LTE to our own AWS cloud server. We developed a custom AWS Lambda function that passed data from the raw MF4 files to a Redshift database that our Engineering Analytics team could then merge in the backend with our TRU's data. From there, we created Tableau dashboards tracking errors in the battery system's energy consumption during operation, as well as locations/durations of stops during affected routes and more. Additionally, if the team needed to inspect the CAN logs directly, we could pull the files from AWS S3 and open them with CANalyzer or Python depending on what we needed to look at. More recently, our team has also started using the plug & play Grafana-Athena dashboard integration for the CANedge.
"With the CANedge2/3 being plug & play to our existing systems, along with the excellent support from CSS, the loggers have become our go-to recommendation for providing better visibility around issues in the field"
What benefit has this led to?
Since demonstrating our success with the CANedge in this customer project, we have expanded their usage to all major products inside Thermo King North America on a case-by-case basis. With these devices, we have been able to provide the engineering teams with insight to sub-second information that has solved race conditions, misconfigurations, and generally, provided a better understanding of the systems they are working on.
Why did you choose the CANedge?
The CANedge is a plug & play device and requires minimal support to get up and running. This means that if someone comes to me with a CAN issue in the field, my first question is going to be "do you have any logs?" and the second will be "can we put a CANedge on the unit?"
— Noah Lopez, Electrification Engineer
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