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POC of a reassuring tracking
21/10/2015

When you entrust a package to a carrier, you naturally want to know what happens to it. Nowadays, there is always a tracking offered from the start with the different shipping solutions.

It's not always reliable. It's sometimes even announced.

And noted.

By insisting, you eventually get the confirmation that the shipment is recognized (taken in charge); which constitutes information with very low added value.

In this case, it eventually arrived but not yet on the tracking to this day (authentic case).

The solution provided by IoT

Connected objects provide a solution to this problem but a GPS geolocalized beacon must have good visibility on the satellites on which the calculation of its position depends. Which is impossible to control for a package.

Hence the idea of resorting to the goody offered by OVH on the occasion of its summit… and the confirmation that a simple motion detector and a temperature sensor provide a very reliable and interesting complement of information.

This experience benefited from a particularly favorable shipping context: 5 days from Lille to Lyon!

The official tracking is particularly anxiety-inducing:

While the information provided by the Sens'It from Axible transmitted by the Sigfox network and read on the IoT PaaS TimeSeries offered by OVH are of exemplary reliability and precision. Even subjected to random handling constraints and in an uncontrollable environment, the beacon always managed to transmit and its signal was always captured!

The red curve is the return from the motion sensor, the black one corresponds to the temperature.

It is clearly understood that the package, shipped on the morning of Friday 16/10/15, arrived in Lyon on 17/10/15 around 12:00 where it stagnated all Sunday in an unheated place since its temperature dropped to 8.5 ºC! It is imaginable that it is not recommended to ship items sensitive to large temperature variations; chocolate in summer for example.

While the official tracking provides rare and alarming news, "Your package cannot currently be delivered to its recipient, the delivery address being incomplete." the sensor returns allow you to know, with an update every 10 minutes, that the package subsists at a temperature compatible with the preservation of its content and above all that it is still moving.

The top of the experience is when the recipient does a double click on the OVH goody button which automatically sends an email to the sender.

Pure happiness.

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