Last month, we went to Houston, Texas, the energy capital of the world, for 1 of our favorite Natural Resources conferences – the Esri PUG GIS Conference! You can see a photo of the Valarmy at our booth on the right. From left to right you’ve got Lorenzo, Edward, and Pawel.
At our booth we had live, interactive sensor demos for monitoring just about anything. Our main demo box was an air quality monitoring unit for mobile air quality monitoring on industrial vehicles or fence-line monitoring, like around refineries.
We work with the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SC AQMD), the government agency for air quality monitoring, to deploy Valarm Industrial IoT solutions. At the Esri PUG conference we had the Valarm box you see in the picture, which can be powered by mains or solar panels, to remotely monitor:
All the real-time sensor data is sent to Tools.Valarm.net.
You can upload your telemetry data to Tools.Valarm.net in the way that works best for each of your deployment locations, some of your applications may use GSM mobile cell networks, some WiFi, some ethernet, long-range WiFi (up to 20 miles), or any combination that makes the most sense for your organization’s remote monitoring needs.
On Tools.Valarm.net, our customers map, graph, totalize, analyze, and receive alerts based on their custom thresholds. After years of experience with customers in over 45 countries, around the world we’ve written this article to share our Industrial IoT experiences on how incredibly important it is to understand your customers.
We also showed Industrial IoT sensors for water monitoring systems. Our customers use sensors made by manufacturers around the world. At the Esri PUG booth we demo’d a Flowline ultrasonic level sensor that our customers use to monitor tank levels and volumes, for tanks full of chemicals like calcium fertilizers. You can also use pulse radar sensors to monitor tanks for chemical distribution, or deploy non-contact liquid sensors on bridges for flood monitoring systems.
There was also a pressure transducer, which is what our customers use to monitor water levels and quantities in remote water wells. Customers also use pressure transducers to monitor man-made impoundment ponds, lakes, and other large bodies of water since it’s more stable and reliable in some locations.
Here you can watch a video with an interactive demo using pressure transducers in tanks to show fluid and water levels changing in real-time as water is pumped between tanks.
There was also a flow meter at our booth, which our customers use to monitor water pumps and water usage.
When deployed on wells, flowmeters use impellers or magnetics to count spins / ticks / pulses for water usage totals, which are stored in totalizers on Tools.Valarm.net. For example, if each count / pulse reported by your flowmeters is 0.25 gallons of water, then for every 8 ticks Valarm counts, 2 gallons of water have been used.
Our customers use the water usage data from the flow meter sensor and combine it with water levels / depths sensor information from water wells. All of this water monitoring information is available in real-time from any device with a web browser, like your phone or tablet, on web-based Industrial IoT dashboards.
Confused about what options you have for water monitoring? Have a look at this article that breaks down all of your options and choices for water monitoring. You’ll quickly and easily learn just what you need for your remote sensor monitoring deployments. Tools.Valarm.net is an open platform so you can use sensors made by any hardware manufacturer like Senix, In-Situ, McCrometer, Davis, Alphasense, and Omega.
And if you have any questions about Industrial IoT and remote monitoring, then you can always call us at +1 (424) 442-0963 or email us at Info@Valarm.net.
Overall it was an awesome and fun conference week in Houston, Texas, the city where I (Edward writing here) was born. We also had a great opportunity to finally meet 1 of our favorite, most exciting customers face to face, see their facilities and industrial equipment. They’re using Valarm for cutting-edge mobile applications, monitoring high tech transport vehicles and trucks with industrial equipment like pumps, motors, generators, and tanks.
Our next conference is the Esri User Conference (UC) in San Diego, California, June 27 – July 1, 2016. Send us a message if you’ll be there at the Esri UC and we can chat more in person! We’ll be at booth Z25. Come visit, get a demo, and learn more about Industrial IoT, remote monitoring, and real-time sensor telemetry at the Esri UC!
