I read the author's articles about the difficulties in IoT and decided to talk about my experience as an IoT provider.
The first article is not advertising, most of the material does not include equipment models. I will try to write details in the following articles.
I don’t see any problems with using GSM modems to collect data from metering devices because I took part in the creation of a collection system for 795 residential buildings, the polling frequency is every hour, stability has been confirmed by three years of operation.
The geography of the working lot network now includes more than 5000 collection points across Russia.
Difficulties
- Connection timeouts - in the basement, the quality of communication, to put it mildly, is not very good, there are two options: leave it as is or change the location of the communication point, but transferring a small amount of data is enough.
- Personnel - yes, there are few of them, but the problem is a little different, not every good specialist will agree to go into the basement without a financial incentive.
- A zoo of equipment can cause a lot of trouble, especially when there are more than 100 different models and modifications, but there are ready-made solutions.
- Data collection server - I don’t recommend reinventing the wheel and writing from scratch, unless of course it’s a project with 100 points and equipment at a facility of the same model.
- Lack of quality of installation at the sites, at each site there are crutches, I will give examples from my personal archive, draw your own conclusions on how you can connect to this without nerves (examples below)
In all cases, external data collection panel
An example of editing when everything is fine (accelerated)
How does it work for the user, using simple or non-simple examples?
1) I'm on the train
2) connected to Russian Railways wi-fi
3) I go to the corporate network
Example 1
VKT7Easy2 and heat computer VKT-7
Enter the IP address:
Getting the settings
Let's try to calculate data for a month
After 10 minutes of experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the train is not the best place to interrogate the instruments located in the basement, but I was able to get readings for the day together with the sentries without any problems.
Example 2 Mercury 230
Let's switch to the electric meter.
Reading the power profile
Source: habr.com