I am building a machine with several sensors, valves, switches etc, I have no problem with any of that while working on one item at the time, and all the arduino sensors, temperature, water level etc work as they should, also I have several relays and circuits opening valves and turning on pumps etc and again they all work great
Now I need to try and get the view of numerous sensors outputs and readings, read valve positions etc and get them displayed on a tablet, also if I could operate the valves and other components by using the touch screen
Another thing in an ideal world would be to have touch screen control of pre set operating processes for example selecting programme 1 on touch screen would open certain vales, allow the system to heat water to a pre set temperature and then open and close other items
The actual creating the system has been relatively simple, arduinos do all the controlling I need but I have zero knowledge of using a touch screen tablet or laptop to control systems remotely, so any help or pointing me in the right direction would be amazing
How far away will the “tablet” be from the rest of the system? Bluetooth range or longer which would require WiFi?
Do you want to use an actual tablet or would you prefer to make one yourself with say another Arduino with a TFT display or perhaps even a Raspberry Pi with a display?
You have multiple options but each have their own hurdles. How much time do you want to invest in getting this setup?
Given the choice, I use an ESP32 serving web pages. That means the tablet only needs to run a browser, as opposed to having to write an app and communicate over BLE.
Hi and ty for answering so swiftly, the tabley will be within approx a 5 metre distance from the machinery so bluetooth would easily cover the data
Time isn't really a problem as I am a retired engineer, I have done lots of Arduino projects but never tried getting the read outs into a control panel with a tablet
hi and ty for the swift reply, serving over web pages wouldn't be a problem, I have my own web servers running several websites but I still have no idea on how I would get the data onto a web page
Thanks for coming back to me so fast, at the moment I am running 1 arduino for controlling the valves, 1 for the sensors, 1 for the different sequences for the process, I have lots or arduino boards and components, just again no idea on how to link each together through maybe 1 board and 1 display
Hi @ArcherToad. You chose the IoT Cloud forum category for your topic. This forum category is used for discussions related to the Arduino IoT Cloud service:
Are you already using Arduino IoT Cloud for your project? It does have a "dashboard" feature that allows you to easily create control panels such as what you described:
I think it can be done with one Arduino but if you are more comfortable with several look at CAN for communications, it works great and is very robust.
There are many commercial units designed to do what you are trying. If this is for a commercial application I would seriously recommending you check into them.
@ArcherToad
I second the IOT Cloud option - it is very good at creating a decent dashboard that works on your phone/tablet over the internet from anywhere or just in the same room. Otherwise you are into coding a UI from scratch, which can be done but is MUCH more work. Also it only works on the UI of the control unit, not your iPhone/iPad, which is what Arduino IOT Cloud will give you.
Start by creating a new device on IOT Cloud, choose an Arduino IOT Cloud compatible Nano or something similar as your hardware. Get that up and running with a blank sketch to start with. Once it's showing as online, add your "cloud variables" on the IOT cloud Thing - you might want to prefix the variables with "cloud_" to make them easier to identify in your sketch code. You will only need to add variables that control the system, or display readings, not all of them. Sync that sketch with your IDE and you will see the sketch has a pre-built framework ready for you to start using.
Now you can start cut/paste your program code into that framework, substituting the control/readings variables in your old code with the new cloud_ variables. You will find these documented in the auto-created sketch.
When that's working you can create a dashboard on your IOT account with switches and so on to control your project and see what's going on, such as this which took only a few minutes to create:
That helps me a lot, I had no idea that this even existed,
I can imagine that with your experience this took you a few minutes but for me I can see a few long evenings in my near future playing with this great function, but that is what I love about Arduino there is always something new to discover
Thanks for the info, as I didn't know what I could actually achieve this seemed a good starting point and the actual help I have received from the forum has been invaluable already, thanks everyone
When you start CAN do it the easy way and Download Cory Fowler's library. The library comes with both a send and a receive sketches. You need both an active transmitter and receiver or more to make CAN work. The reason for both the receiver acknowledges a transmission in the middle of the packet being transmitted.
, I meant, highly highly highly recommend this link !