Executive Summary
Prima needed a secure and robust method to provide continuous monitoring of environmentally controlled storage cabinets. Green Custard retrofitted the cabinets' inbuilt temperature and humidity sensors to provide secure communication to the cloud to allow for continuous monitoring, enabling Prima to pass a key audit for supply to specific government and defence customers.
About the customer
Prima Electronic Services is a highly effective and greatly valued electronics contract manufacturing (ECM) partner, with over 30 years of continued commercial success, supporting: laboratory equipment, process and scientific instrumentation; industrial automation; communication; automotive; transportation; commercial electronics and medical device sectors.
Prima offers a wide range of services - including printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, surface-mount assembly (SMA), conventional through-hole assembly, prototyping and whole product assembly (box build). Working closely with customers, its experienced technical team can take projects from the initial prototyping phase and rapidly move into full-scale production. Through its superior engineering credentials and stringent test/inspection procedures, Prima delivers products to ISO9001 and ISO13485 accredited standards.
Customer challenge
Prima is extending the services that it offers and needs to demonstrate that electronic components are stored as per the manufacturer’s specifications before they are used for board assembly. If the components are not stored correctly, there is a risk that they can catastrophically fail when subjected to rapid temperature changes experienced in the reflow process. Prima’s customers require audit reports of storage conditions with the supply of PCBs.
Charlie Colbert
Engineering Services Manager
Why AWS
AWS provides a range of services, creating a fully-featured, robust, secure, and scalable IoT ecosystem. Building on these services, Green Custard developed and deployed a solution perfectly matching Prima’s requirements.
AWS IoT Greengrass v2 was chosen as the solution for several reasons, it can run on a low-cost embedded controller, it uses robust security measures, the software can be updated remotely and it integrates well with other AWS services.
The Solution
Prima’s dry cabinets had no means of connectivity, so Green Custard retrofitted an array of sensors within the cabinet to capture the humidity and temperature data required for an audit check. The data is sent to a secure cloud storage solution, where Prima can continuously monitor all their dry cabinets.
Prima are proactively notified when defined temperature and humidity thresholds are breached to allow for preventative action to be taken. Additionally, they can easily track and export data relating to a component's storage conditions to satisfy audit and customer compliance requirements. Prima recently passed a key audit for supply to specific government and defence customers.