BattTrackIQ: Battery Monitoring for the WSDMM

Battery systems at the wayside are the silent dependency of every signal house, crossing, and switch in North America. When a charger drifts, a string sulfates, or AC power drops out long enough to matter, the signal system runs on borrowed time, and the railroad usually does not find out until a maintainer arrives on site with a voltmeter. The industry standard for a modern wayside charger is the RECO Smart Battery Charger, a capable third-party device that already produces the data a railroad needs to manage battery health proactively. The problem is that the data stays on the charger. Without an application at the wayside to collect, interpret, and forward it, the railroad is back to the voltmeter.

KB Signaling addressed that gap at the platform level with the WSDMM, a ruggedized, AREMA-compliant edge computing platform deployed at thousands of wayside locations across North America, and with the Certified Developer Program that opens that platform to focused, domain-specific applications. The call was clear: bring third-party wayside devices into the WSDMM ecosystem with software that meets KB's certification standard. OEG answered that call with BattTrackIQ, the WSDMM application that turns the RECO Smart Battery Charger from a self-contained field device into a continuously monitored, network-reportable asset.

BattTrackIQ is a WSDMM-native application that collects, evaluates, and forwards battery state and health data from RECO Smart Battery Chargers, and from KB's own DAU power-monitoring channels where they are deployed alongside the charger. The application runs entirely on the WSDMM edge gateway: nothing OEG built lives in the back office, and nothing has to. A signal maintainer connects to the WSDMM over the local network, opens BattTrackIQ in a browser, and sees the real-time state of every charger the gateway is monitoring — voltage, current, temperature, charge mode, alarm and fault flags, and trended history — in an interface designed for the people who actually work the wayside.

Underneath the UI, BattTrackIQ polls each charger over SNMP using a RECO-specific MIB OEG authored as part of the project, normalizes the readings against configurable, railroad-specific thresholds, and raises alerts when conditions cross a defined boundary. Time-series data is recorded locally to TimescaleDB so the trend history survives reboots and continues to be available even when the back-office link is down. When a back-office link is available, BattTrackIQ forwards events and metrics over MQTT using the Sparkplug B specification — the same standards-based integration path KB's broader ecosystem is built around — so a railroad's existing monitoring platform can ingest battery telemetry without bespoke per-site integration work.

Around the application, OEG built the engineering posture a WSDMM certified app needs to carry: a monorepo with a clean separation between the Next.js web UI and the Deno/Oak backend, Docker Swarm deployment, Debian (.deb) packaging that meets the KB Apps Package install model, encrypted secrets, zero-downtime updates, automatic rollback, and Grafana and Prometheus instrumentation for the operations team. BattTrackIQ also ships with an SNMP simulator the development team uses for verification — and that KB and field engineers can use to demonstrate the application without a charger present.