Sharing experiences and exchanging ideas is vital for users of open-source software. To support the ThingsBoard community and give newbies a good get-go, it-novum GmbH started organizing user gatherings in 2021. With 25 attendees from different companies at the very beginning, the 2024 meetup collected more than 50 on-site participants from all parties of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and even more joining online.
Given Germany’s robust tech and industrial landscape, ThingsBoard has rapidly gained traction among mid-sized and large enterprises as an exceptionally scalable and customizable IoT platform. it-novum has assisted numerous companies in deploying their ThingsBoard solutions, recognizing the importance of the community in facilitating customer adoption.
Since the first edition in 2021, it-novum has organized the yearly user meetings bringing together Meetings are attended by >50 participants with a rising number showing the growing adaption of ThingsBoard in these crucial markets.
After several online editions due to the Covid emergency, 2024 edition took place at it-novum’s hometown Fulda. The agenda contained tech talks, use case presentations, and deep dive sessions to address users’ need for information and exchange. All talks and presentations were recorded and are available at https://data.it-novum.com/termine/thingsboard-user-meetup-vol-5/
Alex Doan, VP Sales & Marketing at ThingsBoard started the meeting with a long-waited product update. To give new users an overview of usecases, Michael Deuchert from it-novum introduced 5 best-of usecases including smart city, smart building, smart factory, energy monitoring and environmental monitoring.
With Rytle, a fleet management user presented their ThingsBoard solution for vehicle management, analytics and customer service providing technician dashboards. Christian Drewes, Head of IoT Solutions & IT Operations at Rytle underlined how ThingsBoard has revolutionized their customer experience.
Matthias Kondrak from Linz AG laid out a focus on architecture. The local authority service provider realized a smart office solution by introducing an IoT centre based on ThingsBoard. It uses Actility, HiveMQ and Kafka and transfers data from Kafka to MongoDB and Oracle via ODBC.
To address the different needs of users, it-novum had organized different tracks in the afternoon. The tech track provided insights to technical aspects and problems. Daniel Bittner from it-novum showed step-by-step how to implement an IoT usecase starting from sensor integration, data collection and visualization in near-real-time dashboards ending in alarm rules definitions. Another demo was provided by Mark André Muth showing how to integrate data from production systems via Inray OPC routers.
The business track was opened by a smart retail usecase. Gunther Dell from VisionVal talked about the challenges in autonomous shopping solutions including privacy and fraud issues. Together with it-novum, VisionVal has developed a GDPR compliant solution for people streams analytics that is purely based on sensors instead of cameras creating high volumes of data. ThingsBoard provides a clear view on visitors numbers, durations of stay, person occupancies and frequency analysis enabling operators to take the right decisions in a fracture of time of that of current solutions.
ThingsBoard makes key machine data available in realtime in the cloud. Christoph Keßler, software developer at concept electronic presented how they made accessible construction machinery data in the cloud making possible machine fleet monitoring at any time.
All talks and presentations were recorded and are available at https://data.it-novum.com/termine/thingsboard-user-meetup-vol-5/.
To escape the digital sphere, the user meeting ended with a fun sightseeing tour in Fulda’s historic city center giving space for networking and socializing. Next user meeting will take place in 2025, updates can be found at https://data.it-novum.com/termine/. New users are welcome!
