Samsara Sensors — Andrew Deagon

Environmental Monitor

Samsara’s gateways acted as a bridge between LTE and BLE, enabling low energy BLE sensors to transmit data to the cloud. These ruggedized sensors could operate for 5 years on a single AA battery. Samsara strategically developed a custom BLE module, which was certified and reused across sensors — cargo detection, door monitor, machine health monitor. The Samsara EM21 led the way.

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The EM21 is a temperature and humidity monitor that allows food and beverage customers to maintain cold chain integrity; eliminating spoilage and minimizing rejected loads.

Following the Samsara design ethos, the EM21 was designed to be simple to unbox, install, setup, and use.

The EM21 obtained customer feedback from its prototype predecessor, the EM11. Field data clearly demonstrated that EM21 needed to be extremely robust to withstand its industrial environments.

EM21 was built for a rigorous reliability test suite and survives ISO16750 vibration, IP67 and IP69k waterproofing, as well as C1D2 and ATEX hazardous location certifications.

The EM21 is still the Samsara temperature and humidity sensor; a testament to its future-proofing.

Machine Health Monitor

The successful EM architecture became a foundation for Samsara to test other sensor types without the lead time and capital costs of kicking off new mechanical tooling. One of those sensor deviations was the HM11 Machine Health Monitor. Electric motors are ubiquitous within manufacturing and the Machine Health Monitor measures and monitors the vibration profile. Through vibration, HM11 could determine if a motor was abnormal, predicting maintenance and avoiding costly downtime.

The HM11 mount utilized high strength neodymium magnets. This mount option was very popular for quick installation and trials, and a go-to mount option. The same mount allowed for more permanent options, such as epoxy or tap and thread mount.

HM11 development intersected mechanical design, electrical design, firmware and signal processing. The cross functional teams had to conduct a broad design of experiments to determine that the device architecture was not interfering with the accelerometer readings, which was critical for accurate signal processing.

The HM11 ended up being the most popular Industrial products due to its simplicity, ease of installation and ROI.

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