***Note: The cable below is from our legacy Android app. For your Valarm Industrial IoT applications, we recommend that you and your organization use dedicated Industrial IoT sensor hubs to remotely monitor sensors like those for:

• Flood Warning Systems – Monitoring Water Levels, Storm Surge, Rising Tides, Rivers, Marinas, Oceans, Docks, Bridges, Natural Disasters, and Environmental Risks
• Water, chemicals, fluids
• Noise, sound, methane
• Levees, piezometers, level sensors, pressure transducers
• Water wells

You can use Valarm Industrial IoT, telemetry and remote sensor monitoring solutions with any of the following connector devices / sensor hubs:

• WiFi Sensor Hub
• Ethernet Sensor Hub
• GSM Sensor Hub

Valarm sensor data is GPS-tagged, time-stamped, and sent to Valarm Tools Cloud / Tools.Valarm.net via any internet connectivity like WiFi, ethernet, or cell network.

With Valarm Tools Cloud you’ll find services for mapping, graphing, 3D Earth Globe Visualizations, and APIs to help you with your real-time, geo-enabled sensor monitoring and Industrial IoT solutions.

Have a look at our Customer Stories page for stories, use cases, remote monitoring, telemetry, + Valarm Industrial IoT applications.

Also see how you, your teams, and you organization will save your time, and your money, with Web Dashboards for Remote Monitoring, Telemetry, Sensors & Industrial IoT.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you need help with deploying an Industrial IoT application or have any questions!

Valarm compatible sensors are available at Shop.Valarm.net.

***[Note: This is information about a legacy cable for our legacy Android app, see above for how to effectively use Industrial IoT applications more effectively with dedicated Sensor Hubs] How do you charge a phone or tablet while running Valarm Pro with external USB sensors? Some tablets (especially 10″ models) are equipped with a dedicated power jack. But most tablets (and all phones) charge via the same USB port that will be hosting your external sensors. A simple OTG+Power “Y-cable” is the solution. Below is a video demonstrating the Y-cable being used to plug a phone into a USB sensor at the same time it is charging.

Why did we solve this problem? Valarm provides sensor and monitoring solutions that facilitate rapid deployment of real-time, ad-hoc, mobile sensor networks for remote environmental monitoring, mobile data acquisition, and asset / vehicle tracking. Valarm connects industry-standard sensors, makes them location-aware, and streams their data to the cloud or to private networks, using readily available commodity hardware. To do all of this our customers in over 30 countries around the world use these USB OTG + Charge Y cables to monitor anything, anywhere!

Where do you get one of these fancy Y-cables? The specification varies between manufacturers, but if you have a Samsung or Sony device, you are in luck!

Micro USB OTG Y-cables for the Samsung Galaxy S2, S3, and S4 are available in the Valarm store.

Want to build your own? You can make your own cable for a Sony device (e.g., Xperia U ST25) by following the instructions below or else you can buy a factory-made cable from us.

Micro USB OTG Y-cables for the Sony Xperia phones are available in the Valarm store.

To build your own you’ll need a few tools and supplies:

• USB cables with Micro USB and full size USB ends
• Soldering iron and solder
• Wire cutters
• Wire strippers
• Dremel or something else to cut and expose a USB cable’s circuit board
• Resistor  (To make a Sony compatible USB OTG+Charging Y cable use a 100K resistor. To make a Samsung compatible USB OTG+Charging Y cable use a 64.9K resistor

First cut off the head of a micro USB male plug and strip the plastic (we used a Dremel and wire cutters) to expose the circuit board.

Next solder one end of your resistor to pin 4 (a.k.a. sense pin). To make a Sony compatible USB OTG+Charging Y cable use a 100K resistor. To make a Samsung compatible USB OTG+Charge Y cable use a 64.9K resistor (available here). The other end will connect to the pad labeled B (which is pin 5/ground).

Strip your USB cables with wire strippers to expose the 4 USB wires: red, green, black, and white here from a Samsung cable (other cable brands may use different colors!). One end will plug into your sensor (Micro USB male) and one into your power supply (Full or Micro USB Male or Female)

Cover this up with hot glue and/or heat-shrink tubing, and this end goes into the phone. The resistor signals to the phone that it should be a USB host, AND also draw power from the USB port. Now you can solder on your USB cable (e.g., male micro) that attaches to your sensor (solder the red, green, black, and white ends to their corresponding pads) and your USB cable (e.g., male full size) that plugs into your power source (solder only the red and black wires for this connection).

All done: plug your sensors and charger into your device using the Y-cable you just made! For the cable in this picture we used a Mini USB connector to go from the device to a USB hub then all of the sensors (CO2, thermocouple, indoor air quality [iAQ, VOCs] in this picture) can be plugged into Valarm Pro at the same time

If

1) You don’t feel comfortable doing any of the steps above (we’ve done it a few times and admit it can be a bit tricky and time consuming)

2) You would not like to take the time (you do get better at it after you’ve done a few but it still takes us almost an hour to do one by hand)

or

3) Don’t have the equipment to build one…

You can buy one of Valarm’s USB OTG charge cables in the Valarm store. Thank you for your support!

Micro USB Host OTG Y-Cable with Micro USB Power for Sony Phones

The cables are compatible with Sony Xperia phones and we have tested extensively with the Sony Xperia U ST25a and ST25i phones, which are the most inexpensive devices we have found that support USB Host and OTG. You can use the cable to charge an Xperia device at the same time as using your sensors, keyboard, mouse, game controllers, any other USB accessory. Many thanks to Przemyslaw Tracz (a.k.a. sonic_boom) for his website detailing how to do this!

Valarm Pro running on a Sony Xperia U ST25i with an air quality (volatile organic compounds, VOC) sensor and charging at the same time.

These cables are one of the keys to using Valarm for remote environmental monitoring. We use these cables and solar power in Valarm deployments such as the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and vineyards / agriculture. You can use these cables with any combination of sensors to do things like Smart water monitoring or anything else you want. Send any comments or questions to info@valarm.net.

Valarm Pro running on a Sony Xperia ST25a phone plugged into a USB hub with a thermocouple temperature sensor and an indoor air quality (aIQ, VOC) sensor