Monitoring Public Park Barbeques with Greenplate

Greenplate is an Australian public barbecue manufacturer who prioritise quality and technology in supplying their BBQ products to the market. As part of this focus, Shape Technology worked closely with them to develop a full hardware and software solution to allow for remote monitoring of these assets. This partnership has culminated in Greenplate having just completed the installation of 53 public barbeques for the Sydney Olympic Park Authority (SOPA), each installed with remote monitoring kits from Shape Technology.

With this latest install, the number of Greenplate barbeques being monitored using Shape Technology’s solution has increased to 68, located across Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Northern New South Wales. SOPA and the other councils that own these assets now have the ability to view a wide range of data from each asset, with 35 different statistics being monitored by the system.

By monitoring the public barbeques in this manner, Greenplate is able to offer the organisations they work with greater efficiency, reliability, and usability. The data provides them full visibility of the asset’s maintenance needs, ensuring that the barbecue down times are reduced while eliminating any unnecessary routine maintenance. The data also gives information around the following;

• Cycle Count – Total number of BBQ cycles
• Door Count – Total number of times the door has been accessed
• Door State – If the access door is currently opened or closed
• Fat Bin State – Current fill level of the BBQ Fat Bin
• Current Mains Power figures – AMP/VAC
• Operational State – If the BBQ is currently in idle or in use
• Power Consumption – Total power consumption of the unit
• Push Button Switch – Current status of the switch enabled/disabled
• Temperature Setpoint – Current BBQ set temperature
• Monitoring and Logging of BBQ faults and usage patterns

These features add to Greenplate’s objective in offering the highest quality product to the market.

The hardware developed by Shape Technology is a Low Power Wide Area Network controller that integrates with the Greenplate BBQ main circuit board. This controller transmits performance data to the software layer every fifteen minutes or instantly if power to the barbeque is lost, restored, whenever the barbeque starts or stops, or if the access door to the BBQ is opened or closed. This is so that all key actions are recorded, and maintenance or remote control can be performed as soon as necessary.  The features allow Greenplate to offer customers remote temperature adjustments, enabling and disabling the push button switch and scheduling for greater control over when and how the Barbecues are being used.

The hardware layer was designed in close partnership with Greenplate to ensure that the controller could be retrofitted into their existing public barbecue range as well as assets already in the field. Their expertise in the field made designing the hardware units a smooth process. Their communication throughout test deployments of the equipment was also vital to the project’s success.

Our cloud-based software solution, OPLEX, has been fully customised and white-labelled for Greenplate. Upon receiving the data, the software performs full validation checks before processing it to display the information. The system is accessed by Greenplate and their end users through a web-based dashboard. The dashboards are customised based on various user groups, to display the appropriate data and controls depending on what the user requires.  We worked alongside Greenplate to customise the way this information is displayed to their stakeholders, using their knowledge of the industry to present exactly what their end users need.

Every step of the way, from design, to supply, to ongoing support, the team at Shape Technology have been privileged to work alongside Greenplate and make use of their extensive industry knowledge. It was by making use of that knowledge that we were able to provide them with our cutting edge IoT monitoring solution. We are proud to have been able to work the entire Greenplate team to improve the quality and experience of using and managing Greenplate public barbecues.  We look forward to rolling out these improvements to councils across Australia and New Zealand.

“We initially started this project to help solve some of the issues that we saw in public BBQ asset management, throughout the development period Shape has worked closely with the Greenplate team in developing this product successfully to the market.”

– Peter Hurley, Managing Director

“The Shape team have always displayed professional and supportive attributes throughout the development process of the BBQ management system, adapting to design changes on the run and being able to come up with inventive solutions to address the project’s needs.”

– Elliot Kimmins, IT and Production Design Manager.

The hardware software full stack solution that has been developed for Greenplate is designed to be expandable as Greenplate’s stakeholders grow and new organisations embrace the power that this technology can provide them. It is simple to add new assets into the system, with hardware units fitted in the factory at Greenplate or retrofitted to units in the field and then connected to the cloud-based software. We look forward to our continuing relationship with Greenplate as the number of assets being managed expands.