When setting up a seamless monitoring infrastructure for environmental conditions, maximum flexibility is required in the choice of sensors and the underlying technology. All too quickly, the costs for mounting and cabling can get out of hand to an unwanted extent. A remedy is provided by IOT modules for modern wide-range wireless networks, which can be used almost autonomously. Together with VBASE, we use such LoRaWAN sensors for monitoring temperature and humidity in BMS projects.
In areas of production and storage of food, pharmaceutical and medical products, permanent monitoring of the environmental conditions is essential. When constructing new buildings, it must first be determined within the scope of a room qualification where the corresponding sensor technology is required. In order to meet the industry-specific requirements, calibratable humidity and temperature sensors were used, which comply with the specified tolerance range for the measurements.
In the course of optimisation, it may be necessary to change the number, position and possibly also the sensor types several times. For this, it is advantageous to handle the sensors as flexibly as possible.
In existing buildings, extensive retrofitting of sensors is also made difficult mainly due to complex cable routing.
Frequently recurring tasks:
In all these cases, the use of wireless sensors is a convenient, fast and flexible way of integration.
Due to the already installed LoRaWAN infrastructure, it was possible to retrofit the offices and meeting rooms in the administration buildings with an air quality measurement and to integrate this into the system as well. In addition to temperature and humidity, fine dust, CO2, ozone and formaldehyde content of the room air are also measured in the administration rooms.
This function in particular proved to be a very helpful tool for implementing a CO2 traffic light during the Corona pandemic.
VISAM relies on modern IoT infrastructures such as LoRAWAN networks to connect the sensors. On this basis, local networks are established and data is collected for visualisation and logging.
Although designed and applicable as a wide-area network, LoRa networks can also be configured as so-called campus networks by integrating local or "private" networks, in which the area of usage is restricted to single project (grounds or larger building complexes).
The data streams from the sensors are collected by locally installed LoRA gateways and are transmitted to a VBASE server system. All incoming data is checked, visualised locally and updated in databases. In addition to checking limit values for undercutting or exceeding, the VBASE server also permanently monitors the battery voltages of the transmitters and the cyclical transmission of the data. In case of deviations, alarms or messages are generated and automatically transmitted (local alarms, email, GSM, messenger). The recorded data (histories) can be flexibly retrieved and exported to common file formats for further processing and optionally sent automatically.
Since a large number of IoT sensors and actuators are now available, there are hardly any limits to applications in many other areas, such as energy data acquisition or air quality monitoring. This technology also offers immense advantages in the area of modernisation, especially of larger complexes.
Very flexible to use.CONCLUSION: Your advantages with wireless monitoring with VBASE
Adaptable to almost any scenarios, industries and use cases.
Many different sensors available.
Very large range and long battery life.
Simple, subsequent integration in existing buildings and systems.Here you can find more information about automation with LoRaWAN.