Bobb – the Smart in Smart Buildings

Our building wasn’t designed to win environmental awards, and it never will. It was designed to be a low-cost long-term revenue generator. And as such, it’s horribly cold in the winter and meltingly hot in the summer.

Bobb and Bobb’s multisensors enabled us to quantify these qualities. The sheer convenience of a battery-powered multisensor meant we could install them everywhere and move them around. We immediately noticed huge temperature differentials. One side of the building is hot in the morning and cool in the afternoon, whilst the other side is the exact opposite. Air temperatures outside are often lower than inside. And the zone above the suspended ceiling is a furnace heated by the huge metal radiator of a roof above. Even on winter white-sky days it’s up to five degrees warmer up there than in the ice box below.

Air conditioning is not very eco, expensive to retrofit, and in a building like ours it’s of questionable efficacy. So we decided to even out the temperature differentials instead. We installed fans and ducting so we can move cool air to the warmer places (or vice versa) and dump the hot air outside. Bobb controls the whole thing. Overall temperatures in our working space have reduced by up to ten degrees in the summer, and in the winter i’s cosier. We have a much nicer working environment year-round for a low energy cost and a ridiculously low equipment cost.

It’s costly when a machine breaks down. Failure often starts in one component but damages lots of others. Breakdown can be inconvenient, or it can threaten the health & safety of staff or public, or even endanger life. Plus there’s the downtime and lost production costs when breakdown occurs. 

Preventative maintenance is almost always a cheaper option. But you need to understand how each component can fail, how often they fail, and how  to detect failure or imminent failure. 

Sensors can give you valuable telemetry data. Sometimes a machine will even have a suite of built-in sensors whose data isn’t even used. Feed this data into Bobb, and you can detect and act upon rapid changes that are out of normal ranges, rising or falling averages, exceeded maximums and minimums and more. Alert someone by push notification or voice announcement, increment an exception count or set a flag to increase the rate of data collection.

Add a Machine Learning solution, and you can drive your predictive maintenance schedules with greater confidence and precision than ever before. Past data becomes training and testing material for an ML model, producing a model that can be demonstrably tested for its prediction accuracy. Incoming data becomes a feed for Bobb, indicating not only intrinsic anomalies but also patterns in the relationship between different metrics. Detect problem components early, plan replacement schedules, prevent component failure, and avoid downtime and associated losses.

Bobb + Machine Learning is the safety enhancing, quality improving, cost reducing tool you always needed, to make your engineering operations run as smoothly as you always wanted.

Call JFDI to find out how we can help you use your data to reduce your operating costs.

Machine Learning is revolutionising how organisations recognise patterns in their data and then act upon those patterns. But raw data isn’t suitable for Machine Learning. You can’t just collect numbers from a sensor and expect a machine to learn from it. You need to add context; other pieces of data that were concurrent with the data gathered. For example, the ambient temperature, humidity and barometric pressure that might influence power consumption data. This is usually difficult, requiring custom programming or manual processing.

Bobb can gather both data and context for you. Set a data collection rule, telling Bobb what to collect. Your incoming data will be stored alongside any number of potentially useful additional facts, with rich context. Bobb builds ML modelling datasets easier than ever before, so you get a jump start in your ML explorations.

Once your data is gathered and your model is built and running, send its outcomes straight to Bobb too. Bobb’s Data Engine stores every outcome and computes useful statistics on your ML processing. Bobb’s Rules Engine turns ML recognitions into actions, notifying, switching and logging according to your needs.

JFDI uses Bobb in these ways to model and verify the behaviour of new sensor devices. Even where a human tester is used, we can gather the context we need to make sense of the data. Before each action the tester performs, a simple push button or remote control tells Bobb the kind of action being tested, and Bobb notes that fact alongside the next data gathered. Thus we get easy to use tagging of incoming data with metadata.

Wherever you have data, Bobb helps you use that data faster and more effectively than ever before.

People were always leaving the grills on in the kitchen. What started out as a nice lunchtime toasted sandwich could quickly turn into a health and safety nightmare. In the workshop it was the same story with soldering irons, heat guns and hot glue guns. We needed a solution.

Bobb monitors power consumption. Bobb knows when things are switched on, and how long they’ve been on. Bobb can turn things off if they’ve been on for too long. Or when no presence has been detected in the vicinity of the appliance for a while.

So… Bobb can switch the grills and soldering irons off. Bobb can tell whoever needs to know, as soon as it happens, by voice or by push notification.

Bobb looks after the safety of your staff. Because they’re only human.

Sure, we designed Bobb for IoT and Smart Building data.

But Bobb doesn’t care what kind of data’s coming in. Bobb can gobble up all your data. Sensors, financial data, market feeds, any stream of data.

And all that data gets enhanced by Bobb, with real-time stats and periodic history. When something changes by more than a certain amount, reaches zero or rises above or below zero, or something’s changing faster than it should, your rules can fire. Your rules, with your conditions and your actions. Notify people. Announce stuff. Store more data. Switch things on or off. Send data to another system. Whatever you want to do whenever something significant appears.

And all this without programming. Bobb is a data processor extraordinaire, a genuine no-code way to automate everything. Best of all, Bobb lives in the cloud and you can do everything from anywhere with a powerful, easy-to-use web app.

Make Bobb the core of all your business systems.

You wouldn’t log into online banking with just a password. Multi-factor authentication has become ubiquitous on the web, but Smart Buildings lag behind. Don’t just rely on a smart lock; ensure your smart building really knows who’s unlocking the front door. With Bobb, security can be as multi-layered as you like. 

Bobb can correlate data gathered from multiple sensors for greater confidence and more detailed auditing. Use RFID, biometrics like face recognition, personal device presence, smart parking sensors and more.

Bobb takes security as seriously as you do.

Settle down with the family for a great blockbuster movie, and let Bobb take care of the details. Bobb doesn’t care that your TV, media centre, lights, doorbell and thermostat are all from different vendors and don’t talk the same language.

Tell Bobb to set the scene by voice, using Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant. Bobb will turn the heating up a notch, the lighting down low, and the TV and media centre on. If the doorbell rings during the movie, you won’t miss your delivery – Bobb will pause the media centre, turn up the lighting and tell you by voice that someone’s at the door, even though you didn’t hear because of the latest, biggest ever Death Star being blasted into dust.

Your meeting rooms are multifunction spaces. They need flexibility built in. But each kind of meeting demands a different selection of facilities set up in a unique way. Bobb can help.

With a single button click on a remote control, Bobb can adjust your lighting, turn on the projector or TV, set the aircon a little lower, start your transcription system, even conduct an automatic roll-call. 

Your meetings happen now, in the 21st century. So why use a 20th century meeting space? Upgrade with Bobb.

Working environments need to be just right to get the best from your people. Your environmental policies demand energy efficiency. So let Bobb take control.

• At 7am every workday, preheat (or cool) the building.
• When people are present, maintain the temperature at 21C.
• When the building is empty, never let the temperature drop below 10C.
• When it’s cooler outside than inside, remind people to open the windows if they’re not open.
• When it’s cooler inside than outside, remind people to close the windows if they’re open.
• When windows are open, turn off the air conditioning.

 Can your existing environmental controls do all this?

 You can set all this up with Bobb in around 20 minutes.

Our Bobb Smart Homes support four lighting modes – normal, mood, minimal and daylight, which are user-selectable or set by time and day rules.

At night, minimal is the default mode, whereas it’s normal mode by day. When there’s someone in a room, the local lighting will be switched to the current mode. Empty rooms have lighting switched off.

But human presence is intelligently sensed, so nobody gets plunged into darkness just because they’re working late, and no waving of arms is needed*.

An empty building will have only essential, always-on lighting illuminated. Outdoor lighting can be controlled by movement or daylight times. When anyone arrives after dark, the entrance lights will immediately switch on to welcome them.

Bobb creates lighting to fit any human activity.

*with Bobb sensor hardware