Data Visualisation
There is no better way to encourage people to work with data than give them a tool which will allow to answer the questions related to the business and to tell the story with the data presented visually.
Data visualisation with Grafana
Grafana is great open source tool for the time series data visualisation, it can be also used to compbine data from the time series and relational databse. Below you can find some examples of the dashboards I created on the on premisses Grafana server I set up.
​This dashboard is used to monitor compressor power consumption and to track cost of electricity for generating compressed air.
I created this dashboard starting with extracting data from the power meters using the Modbus RTU protocol, storing data in InfluxDB.
Having this dashboard displayed in the maintenance department office prompted people to look closer at the cost of generating compressed air and resulted in a series of mini projects aiming to reduce a compressed air consumption. One of them was adding additional functionality to the Machine Monitoring System allowing to automatically isolate the compressed air supply to the machine when the machine is in IDLE mode.
Data extraction
Most of the equipment is capable of providing a valuable data, but very often this is not utilised to the full potential or it's not used at all. Below you can find a couple examples of how data was extracted from the existing equipment. All examples leverage an open source software and the only cost was the hardware.
As already briefly mentioned above I used a Modbus RTU protocol to connect to the existing power meeters. Ten power meeters are connected to the single Raspberry Pi model 3 B+ which is acting as a Modbus master. Data is interpretated and manipulated on the same device and then stored in the company database.
Prototype of the IoT data acquisition module. The device offered multiple digital and analog inputs and was interfaced with the 2 accelerometers over I2C bus and 4 analog sensors. The readings from the device could be triggered or the device could provide a constant stream of data using the MQTT protocol.
In couple of projects I utilsed Redlion DA10 and DA30 units which were used as middleware. These devices are capable to connect to various PLCs and translate protoclos to MQTT. Programming is done using free Crimson 3.1 software.
IoT infrastructure
Below I'm presenting a conceptual diagram of the IoT infrastructure using MQTT protocol. This approach allows to easy scale the solution by adding the new production equipment with the minimum configuration. It also allows to transfer the program and process parameters to the machine controls automatically eliminating the risk of the human error.
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