This was Crate.io's first expert talk of 2023 and counted with the presence of Hernán Lionel Cianfagna, Senior Solutions Engineer at Crate.io and Nixon David Monge Calle, Development and IT Projects Manager, and Michael Mella Navarro, Services and Projects Manager, at SPGo!.
Our host Hernán Lionel Cianfagna did a great job welcoming an international audience. He ensured that either Spanish or English-speaking attendees understood every detail of the expert talk 👏
Nixon David Monge Calle and Michael Mella Navarro, began by telling us a little about their business experience and company history 👇
SPGo! is part of PETROMIN, which has more than 23 years of experience in the mining and oil industries. Michael Mella Navarro explained that while working in north Chile, they identified a few challenges for mining companies, but also opportunities.
SPGo! identified some challenges for the mining companies
"We realized that there is a homologation that both kinds of mining sites need to transport large quantities of raw ore."
- Michael Mella Navarro
After coming to this conclusion, SPGo! brought their thoughts to Petromin, the only representative in Chile for services around fuel optimization for CAEX trucks with fleets from 50 to 120 vehicles, representing a huge amount of materials being transported.
At this time, SPGo! realized something important: The conveyor belts became one of the most critical in a subway mining site, ranging from 1 to 15 kilometers. The equipment inspection is manual, measuring and recording the temperature of the poles via photographs and written notes.
According to Michael Mella Navarro, in the long run, this process can raise several issues, such as:
- Poor ability to prevent future incidents;
- Safety risks of the people who do the inspections;
- Additional costs for the workers: food, work clothes, transportation and equipment;
- Financial losses due to unscheduled stops of the belt.
The solution that changed the paradigm of equipment inspection
Our speakers shared that SPGo! wanted to provide mining companies with a real-time monitoring solution that enables them to collect critical data about their equipment and prevent future incidents.
"A technology that allows you to make decisions at the moment. What is happening today on your conveyor belt can be verified and made on your phone, on the computer or in a monitoring room and all in real-time, 24 hours a day, mitigating risks."
- Michael Mella Navarro
SPGo!'s Development and IT Projects Manager, Nixon David Monge Calle, gave us a detailed description of how they came up with this solution and how it can positively impact several aspects of a business.
The application SPGo! created is capable of monitoring all material conveyor belt idlers (24 hours a day, at every minute) through online sensors. This helps the mining customer save resources, workforce, costs and losses due to downtime.
Nixon David Monge Calle shares that they needed to be able to work locally with all the data, that is, all the big data generated by this conveyor belt.
"Storing all this information over time, in one year is approximately 120 billion records. Not only the amount and volume of data to be stored but the speed with which we need to make queries and every 10 seconds we need to evaluate the condition of each sensor."
- Nixon David Monge Calle
According to our speakers, SPGo! tested several databases like MongoDB, InfluxDB and CassandraDB to support their applications, however, they concluded that CrateDB was the one that meets their needs:
"We have tested many, many databases, which are oriented to work with IoT, but the one that has been at the forefront, especially to generate records and deliver the information with surprising speed, is CrateDB."
- Nixon David Monge Calle
SPGo! highlights that CrateDB is a database that meets all the needs of the large-scale deployment of an application, such as sizeable vertical scale and flexibility, high performance that supports large data intakes, and the flexibility to configure work environments according to specific needs or requirements.
We concluded this talk with some questions from our attendees and hope for what is to come! Currently SPGo! feels good about its future and is expanding its business to other Latin American countries and European countries like Finland.
Do you want to know more details and have access to the Q&A? Watch the recording 👈