We are working with a company that uses high temperature furnaces to bake glass lining on steel. The company is connecting furnaces to a cloud db to build data on operations and to track individual jobs through the cycle. Engineers and managers want to connect all of their measuring devices to a secure control system. They see the benefits which can be as simple as not having to walk 200 yards out to a tank to check something or as important as knowing when to shut down for repairs. Security & wireless capability are key concerns since cost of pulling cable in this environment is very high.
The company is potentially interested in using arduino products to support these goals and are looking for experienced integrators for the project.
If your company has the kind of integration experience and expertise to take on an IoT project of this nature, please respond with (1) examples of previous projects and (2) your recommended approach for this project.
Thanks!
I'll preface this by saying that I myself could not do a project like this.
It rather sounds like the way to go would be to have your sensors pushing data into your cloud DB, and have the data read and interpreted by monitoring software (which would need to be written, of course).
From the arduino point of view, the simplest approach would be for it to simply read all of its inputs (digital and analog) and an id and drop them as a record into your cloud via an HTTP message. It would then be up to your monitoring and control software to know what each of the inputs means.
This approach might work well if you have several different pieces of equipment, or if you frequently move things around and need to reconfigure things. It does place most of the burden on whoever is programming your control system.
If on the other hand you have several pieces of identical and fairly static equipment, it would make more sense for the arduino itself to do at least some of the processing. It would also make more sense for the arduino to do the processing if - for instance - you want an alarm sent to the monitoring equipment if the temperature of something falls too quickly (that is, if response time is important), or if one of your sensing devices is prone to be noisy and you would like it smoothed.
As for security, well - that will be partly physical. The wireless transmitters on the arduinos won't have all that much range. Are you concerned with data leaking out, with false data being fed in, or with the messages from the sensors being corrupted? I don't know what kind of crypto hardware is available for the arduino - perhaps there's some kind of USB dongle which comes with its own internal certificate-level encryption. With luck, your cloud DB could be configured to accept only messages signed with certificates it knows about.
It's certainly do-able. But there's a good chance someone has already done it. A google of "secure remote monitoring temperature" might turn up a better option than hiring some programmers to re-invent the wheel.
Nice project!
Security & wireless capability are key concerns since cost of pulling cable in this environment is very high.
Security comes never for free (especially when designed and added afterwards)
But I do not understand why the system must be secure?
it is just a monitoring application?
Aha the definition of secure is as ambiguous as can be.
What do you want to protect exactly?
Please explain the why of the security, preferably in the form of a scenario.
Do you want to protect against
- a sniffer?
- corrupted data transfer?
- injecting faulty data?
- all of the above
- something else
I understand wireless is preventing costs for wires, but it is by definition less reliable than cables.
but at the costs of extra SW layer one can make it reliable.
TCP/IP is build that way (no rocket science any more, but not trivial either)
@Thomanconsulting:
Some of the first questions I'd ask are
- What wireless infrastructure is in place in the plant within range of the transmitters?
- If none, what's the budget for putting one in place? Or is cellular a possibility?
- What process parameters are you interested in measuring?
- Why does your client feel Arduino is a better solution than existing OTS process control devices? i.e., what benefits are they looking for?
- Has the cloud db been chosen or is that TBD?
- Do you need data caching if the database or its connection is down?
I was the lead on a previous employer's project to put their machinery online for remote monitoring and it was very successful so I do have a fair amount of experience with the problems encountered & benefits achieved. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want to take this on, but it's certainly interesting. If you'd like to discuss further, contact me by PM or email me at lyndon@cedarlakeinstruments.com