Limetrack

Brief

Limetrack chose to work with Embedism to develop the hardware for their SMART wheelie bin.

Embedism had to collaborate with Limetrack’s internal firmware team and an external design company who were managing the electronics enclosure and overall SMART bin design.

The end goal of the project was to produce a small batch of units suitable for deployment to customers utilising Limetrack’s technology.

Ideation

Having already built a working prototype, Limetrack understood the existing functionality required in the production electronics, along with the additional features needed. The ideation stage of this project mostly focused on agreeing a system architecture between Embedism’s hardware team and Limetrack’s firmware team.

Hardware Design

The PCB design was carried out in conjunction with the firmware team at Limetrack and mechanical team at JNDC, along with input from a specialist EMC consultant to ensure the suitability of the design for testing and production.

The primary design challenges were integrating 4G communication, Wi-Fi, capacitive sensing and an on-board NFC antenna onto one PCB. We used our prior experience with these technologies to ensure that these technologies worked in harmony with each other.

For Limetrack’s application, a long battery life was essential. Low power firmware design was employed by the Limetrack team to reduce power consumption, and Embedism completed the design of two buck converters and one boost converter circuit that were tuned to be most efficient within the operating currents required for the downstream circuitry.

Embedism worked with an external supplier for prototype PCB procurement before finishing the boards in-house to keep prototype production costs as low as possible.

Testing and Integration

Hardware bring-up was initially completed by Embedism, with a full test suite then being created by Limetrack to validate PCB construction.

Handover & Manufacture

Embedism generated the manufacturing files for manufacture by a CEM and completed a handover to the Limetrack team who went on to manage the manufacturing process.