While working with furbish I designed an IOT (internet of things) cloud monitoring and control system for their living walls. Based on the challenges of an older building automation systems I decided to adopt the most modern web technolgies to create a secure and easy to use cloud based system. After learning about Restful web services, and existing IOT platforms, I began to develop our own system for getting our living wall systems in the cloud.
After testing muliple PAAS (platform as a service) solutions, I landed on Exosites's platform and began to build a solution around it. I had already developed a monitoring and control system for our living walls, so I simpley had to expand my project to include restful api calls to the Exosite platform to provision, deploy, and communicate details about our walls to exosite's platform. Once data was being collected from exosite's platform I was able to distribute that information to multiple sources with simple api calls. I could also monitor and control all of our living walls from a single platform. This allowed me to build easy to read dashboards where living wall vitals could be observed, and key parameters could be adjusted.
Some of the limitations of older control and automation solutions are:
static addressing- Most embedded controllers on the market that communicate through TCP/IP, require static addressing to access. This means that technicians need to be on site or have a VPN connection to a building to view the controller software. As a result, controllers have to be viewed one at a time.
Cost- Commerical embedded controllers/ PLC's are very expensive. Just the controllers cost at least $300-500, and go quickly rise to $300-10,000. Support from vendors for software often comes in expensive licenses and concrete monthyl fees.
Security- Most solutions in the market do not focus very heavily on security. This is left up to the network IT group to provide layers of security around the controller. To protect access and missuse.
Data management- Most embedded controllers store vital data locally. This limits how much data can be stored, and what that data can be used for. Firmware/ Software updates are often needed to be done one at a time, and in many situation are custom to the controller and it's application.
The new Furbish monitoring and control solution provides solutions to all of these issues and more. Some of the most notable features are:
Lean design/ Affordability- The actual controller cost for Furbish is less than any other option on the market. Support, cloud hosting, liceneses, etc. are all provided in a very afforable scalable solution in which each new system only costs a few dollars a month. There is no large up front investment for this system.
Resful web services- By building the core functionality around restful web services, the Furbish monitoring and control system is built with security and scalability in mind. The web serivce provides a single access point for all data from every wall to be viewed. Custom dashboards, and platform features allow a high level view of data, but also provide the opporunity for team members to drill down deeper into the data as needed.
Web hosted- The means that access to the monitoring and control is almost completely device agnostic. Any device with a web browser can log on to the system from anywhere in the world. Every system online and offline can be viewed from a single view as well. Out team can see which walls are currently online, offline, and have thrown an alarm from single web page.
Multiple dashboards- This feature allows for team and clients to have their own dashboards so all parties can easily view the items most important to them.
Device/ Model architecture- By deploying a new system based on a standard model, all monitoring, control features, alarms and event montiroing can be replicated with the click of a button. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to get each new system up online.
(Note: This project is ongoing, and new features are added regularly)
