A cooler or a vending machine spends its life in an outlet that belongs to somebody else. Fitted with a controller, it reports whether it is powered, cold and being opened, so the brand that owns it knows which placements are working.
The commonest fault on a placed cooler is that somebody unplugged it, for the socket or for the noise. Power state answers that directly. A temperature that drifts slowly in a full cabinet does not.
A machine that is powered, cold and never opened is in the wrong outlet, or behind a pillar. Door activity is a placement signal. It is not a sales figure, and it should not be sold as one.
The brand wants the whole estate, the distributor a region, the service company only the units it maintains. That is an account structure, and it has to exist before the second distributor arrives.
A starting list, not a fixed kit. The ports are set from the dashboard, so the same controller takes a different mix of sensors on a different model.
| Signal | How it is read | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Power state | Supply sense on a digital input | Units unplugged or switched off at the outlet |
| Cabinet temperature | 1-Wire or PT1000 probe placed with the load | Whether the product is being served cold |
| Door openings | Dry contact on a digital input | How often, and at what times of day, the machine is used |
| Compressor current | Clamp-on current sensor over RS485 | A unit working harder than it should |
| Check-in | The cellular link itself | Whether the unit is alive where it was placed |
Four ports on one controller, and RS485 devices share a bus, so most of this list fits on a single unit.
One machine reporting is a gadget. Every machine you have shipped reporting to the same place is a service business.
Each machine reports to the same cloud. Your service desk sees which units are running, which are in alarm and which have gone quiet, before the customer calls.
Accounts nest: you sit above your dealers, and each dealer above its customers. A parent account cannot grant more than it holds, and a unit can be shared with a service company without handing over a login.
Readings and events are stored with their time and export to Excel, for a warranty claim, a service report or a disagreement about what happened and when.
A REST API with scoped tokens covers what the dashboard covers, so fleet data can feed your service system, your ERP or your customer portal directly.
The controller takes 6 to 32 V DC, so it runs from a 12 or 24 V supply already on the machine. Its internal rechargeable battery keeps it reporting after the machine loses power, which is when the reading matters most.
It connects over 4G-LTE from wherever the machine is installed. There are no Wi-Fi credentials to collect and no IT department to convince at each customer.
If the machine already has a controller with an RS485 Modbus RTU port, give us its register map and we add it as a supported device. Its values and alarms then arrive alongside the sensor readings.
The web dashboard is served on your domain with your name, logo and colours, and the iOS and Android apps are published under your own developer accounts. Your customers log in to your product.
Readings are held on the device while the network is down and sent in order when it returns, so the record has no gap where the incident was.
No. A door contact records that the door opened and when. It does not know what was taken or how much. It is a good signal of whether a placement is being used, and that is what it should be used for.
Yes. Accounts nest, so a brand sits above its distributors, and a unit can be shared with a service company without sharing a login. The boundary is enforced by the platform, not by a filter on a screen.
Either. Every controller comes with OmniCloud included, and the REST API does what the dashboard does if you would rather build your own front end on top of it.
The supply voltage available on the machine, the signals you want reported, the register map if the machine has a Modbus controller, and how your dealers and customers should be separated. A first batch on machines already in the field is the usual way to begin.
Over the air, by cellular. Where there is no network at all, the unit raises its own Wi-Fi access point and takes the update from a phone or laptop beside it.
What it is, what you want it to report, and who needs to see which units. We come back with how the controller wires in and how the accounts would be laid out.
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