Wirepas – Innovation Project

Intro • Solution overview

The solution simplifies displaying massive amount of sensor data collected for a parcel

tracking service. Which parcel is at what time at what location? Which status have the

parcels?

All data collect with the help of Wirepas IoT technology.

• Key technologies used

Power BI Embedded, Azure App Services

• Core Team:

Rudolf von Stokar, Country Manager Germany, Austria, Switzerland,

Oliver Scheer, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft,

Customer profile

• Wirepas, www.wirepas.com

• Wirepas is focused on providing the most reliable, optimized and scalable device

connectivity to its customers. With their help customers can digitalize their current

business processes and innovate for new disruptive models. With Wirepas Connectivity

there is no need for traditional repeaters, because every wireless device is a smart router

of the network. The connected devices are the network – easy as that. In nature, things are

communicating making autonomous decisions based on the protocol that is optimized to

fulfill the need as efficiently as possible – nothing more, nothing less. This is also what

Wirepas is all about.

• Wirepas has its headquarters in Tampere, Finland and offices in France, Germany, South

Korea and the United States.

• Wirepas was established 2010 in Tampere, Finland. The company has its roots at Tampere

University of Technology where a ten-year research project was conducted around the

radio frequency mesh technology. Wirepas is a privately owned company. Its shareholders

include founders, Inventure Investment Fund, management shareholders and private

investors.

Problem statement

The technology of Wirepas is collecting a wide variety of data by its connectivity service. Every

wireless device build on Wirepas software technology, can collect and send a huge amount of

data. This data is collected in several ways, in databases and files of the cusotmers. Visualizing this

data is key to get an overview of current state of "things" tracked by the technology.

The end user of our developed solution are the customer of Wirepas. They need an

"interpretation" of the collected IoT data, to get overview and to make easier decisions.

Solution, steps, and delivery Parts of the solutions are currently online here: https://wirepas.azurewebsites.net

1. Acquiring the data

The data collected by the Wirepas technology is collected in customer "storage". This can be files,

databases, etc. A supporting customer gave us access to their data. This data has to be imported,

and cleaned up. For the Proof-of-concept, we used Power BI directly.

For the proof of concept, we imported the data from a csv file, which was exported from a

customers database. In further versions we will connect directly to the database, with the Direct

Query Feature, in the meantime, we use import.

2. Cleaning the data

The data has a domain specific model. This has to be cleaned up, and converted to a human

readable format. We did this by using Power Query. We gave sense to plain Ids, to enable

readable values to the end consumer, like "1000" --> "Region South".

3. Designing the report using Power BI Desktop

After importing and cleaning the data of 1 million sensor data, we used Power BI to design

dashboards which enables the customer to get overviews of all data, and enables him to drill

down to one single parcel, and the parcel history.

Some impressions of the dashboard.

4. Creating a Power BI Workspace

To create the Power BI Workspace in Azure, we used the powerbi-cli. Currently there is no UI

available to create workspaces for Power BI in Azure, therefor we used the powerbi-cli

https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI-Cli

Power BI CLI can be easly installed via npm:

npm install powerbi-cli -g

Creating a workspace is done by the following statement:

powerbi create-workspace -c wirepasreports -k <key_to_powerbiembedded_in_azure>

5. Uploading PBIX-File

To upload a Power BI Report to this Workspace you only need an additional command of powerbi-cli

powerbi import -c wirepasreports -k <key_to_powerbiembedded_in_azure> -w <the_name_of_workspace> -f <the_filepath_to_the_thereport> -n Overview -o

6. Embed Power BI in Web App

Power BI embedded enables developers to embedded reports in almost every kind of app. The

easiest way is, embedding it into a nice website. To get a website, we used Azure Web App to

host a simple Asp.Net MVC App based on a standard template for Power BI embedded

(https://github.com/Azure-Samples/power-bi-embedded-integrate-report-into-web-app).

• Architecture diagram/s (required). Example below:

• One learning by Microsoft was the amount and type of data, which we structured and

converted. Power Query is an awesome tool for ETL-Processes.

• Wirepas was positively suprised by the speed and friction free tooling, and uploading of

Dashboards.

Next Steps The running solution is the first project Azure Project using Power BI embedded. Wirepas is

fascinated about Power BI embedded on Azure, and the easiness and speed of implementation.

We are already working on the next steps. Next steps are pushing the sensor data to Azure IoT

Hub, and with the help of stream jobs to SQL Database and also for custom analyzing tools to

blobstorage as well. Blobstorage is triggering Azure Functions to send messages to customers

("Your parcel has passed station xyz").

For Wirepas it was a proof for the Power of Microsoft Technologies, delivering IoT Data fast and

easy to consumers. The first public presentation was at the Bosch Connected World.

Conclusion For Wirepas it was a very smart and easy way to bring their IP to the cloud, in an easy and fast

implementation. The whole project needed only 10 Hours of calls, consulting, and

implementation.

• It is very easy to bring complex data to Power BI and convert it to easy data for faster

descisions on the web.

• For the Bosch Connected World, it was an easy demonstration of complex data. Based on

Azure and Power BI embedded.

• Opportunities going forward:

After demonstrating the fast and easy process of creating and deploying dashboards to

the Azure Cloud, the next steps are enabling real life data by connecting customers

database directly to Power BI embedded, instead of importing data manual.

The evaluation of the Azure IoT Hub is also on the roadmap, which could be used in

different customer scenarios.

Since the workshop and now, Wirepas already won several new customers, which are

using Wirepas products and dashboards powered by Power BI embedded.

CUSTOMER QUOTE

We have used Power BI to reformat Millions of lines of sensor data for the usage in Azure.

Handling Power BI was extremely easy, results are visible on the fly. Microsoft Azure immediately

took this data for vistualization and we were able to analyze our data on anormalities right away.

Rudolf von Stokar, Country Manager, Wirepas*