EBV Elektronik’s design support capabilities help bring NaBi Solo, an innovative long-life tracker to market for next-generation IoT-based asset tracking applications

Designed to operate for years, without external power or charging, the company’s NaBi Solo is a special battery powered long-life tracker product that enables the collection of GPS location with any kind of sensor data, for example, for a variety of devices in a wide range of use cases – from the location of a piece of machinery or a gas bottle to the internal temperature of a food transport container. The use of low-power transmission technology and its highly flexible configurability means the NaBi can monitor any assets without electricity, thus inducing a paradigm shift in the asset tracking & smart sensor industry. There was no feasible solution before the deployment of 5G technology to GPS track an excavator bucket or a traffic sign for many years.

A Red Dot award winner in 2021 in the ‘smart product’ category, the NaBi is a configurable smart sensor device that employs ‘NarrowBand-Internet of Things’ (NB-IoT) – a standards-based LPWAN (low-power wide-area network) technology. Leveraging the use of the 5G mobile network, NB-IoT enables the transmission of relatively small amounts data while using extremely low levels of power consumption.

The device enables the sending of data to cloud-based data-analytics processing software – which can then be used by organisations to optimize processes and significantly reduce or even eliminate costs, as well as potentially creating completely new business opportunities. The collected data can be read by customers via web interface, mobile app or a REST API.

From the beginning of the project, a local team of engineers from EBV worked closely with the NaBi design team at General Mechatronics. The EBV team helped with the selection and sourcing of many components, especially those devices that provided the compute power and wireless connectivity for the NaBi Solo, including the powerful STM32 family of microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics and antenna from Taoglas.

“The EBV support team delivered a really high level of technical support, together with strong and responsive customer care,” said Géza Szayer, owner and founder of General Mechatronics. “EBV also has strong relationships with manufacturer’s engineering teams, thus giving us a great overview about preliminary state products and the future of semiconductor trends. This enables our company to keep ahead by designing tech products beyond state-of-the-art.”

“The relationship built up between our team of application engineers and supply specialists and the NaBi design team is a great example of what can be achieved between a distributor and a maker of highly innovative cutting-edge products,” said István Gnyálin, Technical Account Manager at EBV Elektronik Hungary. “Additionally, it shows that small teams of engineers – from both sides – working closely together can really make the difference. It also demonstrates EBV’s resources to quickly deploy expertise and product development capabilities that can meet the needs of leading innovators across Europe.”