For companies managing critical facilities, the ability to identify functional drifts and equipment degradation before they impact operations is essential. Sensor Reply, a company within the Reply Group specializing in edge and embedded AI for industrial applications, set out to develop a smart monitoring assistant for HVAC fan coil units in laboratory environments. The goal was ambitious: build a solution capable of executing diagnostic and anomaly detection functions entirely at the edge, directly on industrial hardware, without requiring continuous cloud connectivity for core monitoring and analytics.
The system needed to connect multiple protocols and sensor technologies, process data locally with low latency, generate actionable KPIs in real time, and integrate seamlessly into a broader edge-to-cloud continuum architecture that included a multi-agent AI system. This AI layer would enable natural-language data analytics, automated chart generation, and maintenance planning – all running on an edge gateway. For this, Sensor Reply needed hardware that could bridge the gap between industrial-grade field deployment and the flexibility required for innovation projects.
In their system, Opta handles real-time data acquisition from HVAC sensors, executes on-device anomaly detection logic to identify functional drifts and equipment degradation, and synchronizes preprocessed data and KPIs with an edge gateway hosting a multi-agent AI system. The gateway enables natural-language data analytics, automated maintenance planning, and AI-driven compensation strategies when units fail – all running without cloud dependency. Users can request custom reports and visualizations through natural language, while the system autonomously identifies optimal workload distribution across remaining units during failures or overload conditions.
The platform’s industrial-grade hardware combined with rapid development workflow enabled quick prototyping, custom logic integration, and architectural flexibility throughout the project. The solution is now showcased at Reply Area42, the company’s innovation lab welcoming over 250 customers annually, and has generated positive market response at trade fairs, creating follow-up opportunities with customers interested in similar industrial monitoring solutions.
“Opta proved to be a valuable enabler for our Smart Monitoring Assistant for HVAC systems. It helped us create a compact, modular, and edge-intelligent solution that bridges field data acquisition, local anomaly detection, and cloud integration. For us, it was a good balance between industrial robustness and development agility.”
– Ilario Gerlero, Associate Partner at Sensor Reply
Beyond HVAC monitoring, the company is exploring Arduino® VENTUNO™ Q as a platform for more advanced edge AI use cases. Its capabilities – including on-device computer vision and LLM-based processing deployed directly at the edge – align with Sensor Reply’s focus on bringing intelligence closer to the field where fast response, autonomy, and reliability are critical.
Arduino, Opta, and VENTUNO are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arduino S.r.l.