CASE STUDY | BLYNK IOT PLATFORM

Aquascape: smart water gardening product line

INDUSTRY: SMART HOME

A smart pond monitoring and control system

Aquascape is one of the largest North American producers of premium ponds and water gardening supplies. They invented a low-maintenance ecosystem pond approach to designing, building, and maintaining water features that rely on a natural balance of circulation, filtration, plants, fish, rocks, and gravel to ensure sustainability.

Challenge

Aquascape was looking to implement IoT technologies to offer a better experience to their customers and optimize their business processes.

Among their key goals were:

  • To automate their multiple products pond ecosystem
  • To bring innovative connected products to the market
  • To get more insights into what happens to the devices after they leave the production floor

The Aquascape team did not have IoT expertise in-house, therefore was looking for a reliable IoT platform and development partner to optimize their costs and shorten the time to market.

Solution: Smart Backyard

Aquascape chose Blynk over other well-known IoT platforms for the quality of the platform and for the unparalleled value for money, our offering represented.

As of today, Aquascape has already launched multiple products with Blynk, including a smart plug, autodoser, smart thermometer, smart color lamp, and smart pump.

Intelligent Thermometer, for example, not only provides Aquascape customers with real-time water temperature data, but also sends context-aware notifications with important information on water features maintenance.

One of the upcoming Aquascape’s Blynk-enabled IoT products is a Smart Pond Dosing System XT. It allows feeding chemicals, beneficial bacteria, and other water treatments into ponds in small quantities to keep the water clear and adjust the hardness. Here the system can monitor whether treatment stocks need to be replenished and send notifications to users based on results offering to buy chemical products directly from them.

As Smart Pond Dosing System XT is more technically advanced and also to get the workload off the Aquascape team Blynk Studio built the firmware and some product-specific features for this product.

Interoperability

Interoperability is the holy grail of connected products. With the Automation feature of the Blynk IoT platform, customers can create their own automation scenarios, where devices can turn on or off based on the time of day, day of the week, or even at sunset or sunrise. Through Blynk Aquascape devices can interact with each other. For example, when the pond temperature reaches a certain level, the color of the garden lights changes to red.

Next level of Customer Service Enabled by IoT

Now we are implementing a powerful and easy-to-use IoT software to help keep track of their products and deliver the best end customers experience.

The Aquascape marketing team can use a personalized approach to end customers with a new direct communication channel that has been established. They can send customized notifications based on products and other contextual data on a device state, recommendations on system usage, and keep an ongoing communication.

All devices' metadata like geography, when the device was used, how long, and so on can be analyzed in Blynk Console and Blynk Apps.

In addition, the end-user device activation flow is powered by Blynk.Edgent - an out-of-the-box solution that allows configuring a seamless WiFi device provisioning flow without the need for extensive coding.

Results

  • Built a ready-to-use prototype within one working week
  • Created a whole new marketing channel for the company
  • Built an integrated platform for frameworks that can be easily updated and supplemented with new products without additional efforts
  • With the help of rapid development, we were able to conduct studies at early stages enabling us to get feedback and make effective ongoing improvements
  • Improved the system productivity
  • Built an effective production-grade system to better connect with end customers and keep track of each sold device

James Crowley, Product Manager at Aquascape

We have been using Blynk software platform for the last 3 years with excellent results. Our clients love managing their devices with Blynk-powered mobile apps and we are continuously expanding our line of connected products.

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