Laundry machine with integrated payment system by Schulthess Maschinen AG
Schulthess Maschinen AG is a long-established Swiss company that develops and produces washing machines and dryers for private households, apartment blocks and for business and industry. Schulthess stands for top quality and customer service, innovation spirit, sustainable production - and for Swiss made.
Schulthess developed a laundry machine with integrated payment system for laundries. Where all the required components are integrated within the laundry machine. Mongoose OS is used on the embedded device (ESP32 based) responsible for the communication to the machine controller, RFID reader and the backend system. The embedded device reports the machine status information, handles payment requests (payments, refunds and balance checks), manages price lists and the machine configuration.
Schulthess vision was to develop a solution as an open platform that can be extended for the future
requirements. Usage of a proprietary closed IoT platform was a no-go, as the risk to depend on specific
hardware or suppliers is too high.
“Mongoose OS provided most of the required features, like communication to IoT Clouds out of the
box. There was no need to think about device configuration, Over-The-Air firmware updates and remote
procedure calls. Plus we are still free to use other hardware or IoT backend in the future.”
says Michael Schwetz, a lead Software Engineer and Project Manager at Schulthess.
Working with Mongoose OS
Schulthess evaluated multiple IoT systems suitable for the development of the planned payment system,
they compared the backend features, included embedded software and hardware modules. They started to
develop a first prototype, in parallel to the research, and decided to use Mongoose OS for the embedded
software part. Mongoose OS was selected, as it provided support for the standard hardware components
(microcontrollers like Texas Instruments CC3200 and Espressif Systems ESP32) and flexibility to connect product to any of the key IoT
Clouds or other generic MQTT servers.
“The first step to get a simple prototype online was done within a few days. We realized that
Mongoose OS provides most of the required features on the device side. In contrast to off-the-shelf
IoT systems that showed a very bad cost-value ratios. This result lead to the decision to go ahead
with Mongoose OS. We built our solution based on Mongoose OS for the device side and low-level IoT
services for the backend side.” continues Michael Schwetz.
The embedded modules were running very stable from the very beginning. Schulthess used the OTA update
capability starting from the first prototype, that helped through the development phases and worked
reliable all the time.
“Whatever communication interfaces are used, the RPC interface, the MQTT interface or the integrated
web server, they are all very well-engineered. The openness to various IoT backend systems, from Microsoft
Azure to IBM Watson is amazing. It would be very difficult to find an alternative to Mongoose OS with these
features already integrated. On top of it Mongoose OS team was always very helpful.” we heard from Schulthess.
Company
Launched in
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Products
“The openness to various IoT backend systems, from Microsoft Azure to IBM Watson is amazing. It would be very difficult to find an alternative to Mongoose OS with these features already integrated.” - Michael Schwetz, lead Software Engineer and Project Manager
