2020 – The Year of Disaster & Miracles

• Electronics • Company articles • South-East European INDUSTRIAL Мarket - issue 4/2020 • 02.11.2020

The entire electronics industry has been suffering from the COVID-19 crisis since the very beginning of the year, supply chains have been shut down, production decreased dramatically. This is the right time for a healthy company to invest into the future instead of hiding wounds licked. So we did it at Endrich and fulfilled our long time wish of finding a way to extend our core business – component distribution – with higher level of integration of our products, offering complete solutions to customers. The Endrich Engineering team based in Budapest has developed and introduced a complete IoT test infrastructure and has also used the time to go online with an engineering knowledgebase built over the last several years.

IoT is a field, where all our components fit very well, and Endrich has already declared its willingness to support this industry by selecting the leading component manufacturers to represent.

IoT is simple, there are sensors, their data has to be collected by microcontrollers, based on rulesets the MCU has to control other circuits and needs to transfer the data over low power, wide area networking GSM modem technology such as NB-IoT or LTE-M into a cloud database. Endrich offers high-tech parts for this, but hardware made of components without services does not mean a solution.

Starting from the first IoT demos offered at Electronica 2018, Embedded 2019 and 2020, we have been developing a number of services such as the Endrich Cloud Database and the Endrich Visual Gateway services, which we have now made accessible to our customers.

During the pandemic, we have been developing a family of hardware devices, which offer sensing, controlling and communication tasks, they can measure the environmental parameters, transmit them by GSM network to the Endrich CDB and visualize them on a handy or professional display. Based on preprogrammed rule sets, the IoT board family is able to control other circuits too.

All the key components belong to our manufacturers and represent recent novelty technologies:

Sensors:

Tateyama and Semitec temperature sensors
Everlight ambient light sensors
TDK MIcronas Hall sensors
Sensolute vibration sensors
BSE MEMS microphones

Power supplies:

MPS and ESMT DC/DC converters
EVE Li-SoCl2+SPC battery pack solution Protection:
ProTEK Devices TVSD solutions

Microcontroller:

GigaDevice RISC-V MCU & Flash memory

Timing:

SiTime MEMS Oscillators

Communication:

Fibocom NB-IoT / LTE-M / 2G modem family
2J Antennas

Interfaces to sensors:

NJRC SPI ADC converters
HOLTEK I2C ADC converters

LEDs:

Everlight and Dominant signal LEDs

We exhibited this concept – for the first time since it was completed – at the Industry Days 2020 Exhibition in Budapest, where the Endrich IoT Ecosystem (including the IOT hardware family and the own software services) has been nominated and later awarded with the Grand Prix of the event. We hope this is the start of a new era, where a special technical distributor company offers an extended service to its customers in design.

We did not only develop hardware and software for our customers, but we also used the lockdown time to entertain them by publishing over 20 different technical articles. Our award-winning book series “Publications in Electronics 1-7” has gone online at our knowledgebase portal http://electronics-articles.com, which produced nice results according to underlaying statistical analysis. This portal is free for our customers and they can find almost hundred technical articles related to Endrich’s suppliers’ innovations, techniques and solutions. We are also very proud that after the first award in 2016, now the online version won the Grand Prix of Industry Days Budapest in the Special Award category.