Geofencing capabilities have been released for Tools.Valarm.net. This is a feature requested by multiple Valarm Tools Cloud customers, perhaps yourself included.

In this blog post we’ll go through, step-by-step, just how to set up your 1st geofences.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions, requests, or feedback.

Geofencing lets you specify polygon areas or zones on a map and then trigger any alerts your organization needs.

And all the while you’ll be uploading sensor measurements that are specifically tagged to let you know when your Industrial IoT devices are inside or outside of your custom drawn shape.

You can use geofencing with any of your IoT sensor devices you’re monitoring with Tools.Valarm.net, so long as you have at least the following from Shop.Valarm.net:

  1. Sensor Hubs – GSM cell networks are preferable since you’ll need mobile internet connectivity to see your mobile devices you’re geofencing, like industrial assets, trucks, and vehicles
  2. GPS / GNSS Sensors – Send the latest latitude, longitude, and altitude coordinates from GPS satellites to your sensor hubs so you know where your IoT sensor devices are and when they’re entering or exiting your geofences, as well as how long your assets are inside or outside of your geofences

You, your teams, and your organization can add any number of sensors to your sensor hubs, like 4-20mA sensor adapters for monitoring tank or water levels, PWM sensors for monitoring flow meters, temperature, humidity, and other sensors from Shop.Valarm.net.

To get started using Geofencing click the Geofences menu item in the top that’s in the list with other Valarm Tools Cloud software features like 3D GIS and Esri ArcGIS Tools.

Once you’re on the Geofences page, you’ll 1st want to make a new Geofence collection by clicking the New button under Geofences.

Then give your Geofence a name and description.

Now it’s time to add a zone / polygon to your geofence. Click the New Zone button.

When you’re ready to draw your polygon, you can click the polygon drawing button that’s pointed at with a red arrow in the screenshot you see in this blog story. You can also change your basemap to the map that best fits your needs.

Once you’ve click the polygon drawing button you can single click to add a vertex to your zone polygon and then double click when you’re finished drawing your polygon. That’s it!

Remember to give your geofence zone an appropriate name. Choose whether you want your geofence trigger mode to be when a Valarm IoT sensor device is inside or outside of your newly draw, custom zone polygon.

Your output channel is where Valarm Tools Cloud will write a 1 to your selected data channel / column, if your trigger mode is true. For example, if you chose trigger mode Inside and your device is Inside your polygon. Otherwise it will write a 0 a.k.a. false when your device is outside your polygon. If you choose the outside trigger mode then you’ll reverse this logic and a 1 / true will occur when your IoT sensor device is outside of your geofencing zone and a 0 / false when your sensors are located inside your geofence.

Make sure you enable your geofence zone and your geofence collection by clicking the checkboxes and then clicking save.

Now that you’ve made your geofence you can activate your geofence for any of your IoT devices measuring sensor telemetry.

Go to your Device Manager and click the name of your Valarm device that you’d like to configure for geofencing.

Select Geofences under the orange Configure Data Path menu.

Now in the pop up window you can select your active geofence collection.

Use the drop down menu to choose your geofence that you just created.

Click save. You’re done!

You’ll see the your geofence true / 1 and false / 0 values in the field you chose.

You can see in the screenshots that we’ve set up custom column name aliases for tracking this industrial vehicle that is monitoring temperature, humidity, pressure and location.You’ll see the 0 and 1 values in the Geofence column / field.

Your geofencing results can be integrated into your web dashboards, business analytics and intelligence systems, send email alerts based on when a vehicle sensor is, entering inside or exiting outside of your geofences.

That should get you started with your geofencing on Tools.Valarm.net.

Valarm Vehicle Fleet Tracking 1If anything didn’t make sense, or you’d like more details, or have any other questions, then please don’t hesitate to talk to me at Info@Valarm.net.

We’re here and ready to help you, your teams, and your organization to save your time and your money by monitoring Industrial IoT sensor devices with Tools.Valarm.net.