Pre Sales - Which is best fit for me?

Hardware
1

I get the concept of mesh IOT devices, But which Gateway is the best for me?

I work in the manufacturing business, looking to provide some facilities with basic environmental sensors. We currently have a SCADA System, and can take data in numerous ways. (MQTT, JSON, TCP Packets, Modbus, OPCUA, etc, etc). I want to power the gateway via PoE 802.3af. I want to be able to turn off any calls to the outside world, and I want to be able to set my own schedule for updating the data IE: I want to grab updated temp and humidity every 10 minutes, or 30 minutes, or whatever. (I know that will have an affect on battery life in the sensors).

I have been disappointed by other companies’ offerings, either only allowing me to change settings if I purchase their “Enterprise” software, or making me go through their “portal” to get at “my” data.

What do you have that might meet my requirements??

Thanks,
Troy Backus

2

Hi Troy,

Unfortunately we don’t currently offer a modem or gateway that runs on PoE.

So I would say you may be better off using an MQTT gateway: https://store.ncd.io/product/mqtt-gateway-wifi-long-range-iot-sensors/ which can connect to arbitrary MQTT brokers. If your SCADA hardware is acting as an MQTT broker you could send the data to it. If is just subscribing to an MQTT broker you would need to set the gateway up to connect to that broker.

If that doesn’t sound like what you’re looking for I would look at the https://store.ncd.io/product/industrial-wireless-usb-modem/ connected to a computer running Node-Red. Node-Red will parse the data and you can configure it to shoot the data over to your SCADA software via TCP in the format your SCADA software will accept. This method requires you to have an edge computing device to parse and translate the data for your software. This is probably the route I would try first, because integrating into existing software sometimes requires putting the data into a specific format and having a computer there makes this infinitely easier.

We don’t require you to access the data from your sensors in any particular way or even send it out of network if you don’t want to. You can write your own software to parse and store the data if you’d like. Its all documented, from the wireless protocol we use down to the packet structure.

All of the enterprise line of sensors have a configureable wake up time and the default is 10 minutes between transmissions.

As you can tell there are a lot of different ways to do this and it mostly depends on preference and end-goal.

Here’s a list of environmental sensors: https://store.ncd.io/shop/?fwp_main_facet=enterprise-solutions&fwp_product_type=environmental-sensors

Most people asking about environment sensors are generally talking about this sensor in particular though: https://store.ncd.io/product/industrial-iot-wireless-temperature-humidity-sensor/
or this sensor: https://store.ncd.io/product/iot-long-range-wireless-environmental-temperature-humidity-pressure-air-quality-sensor/

That was a lot of information so let me know if you have any more questions or if I missed something.

3

Hi Troy,
all ncd.io software are free and can be downloaded from product page at no cost.

once you purchase the hardware. the hardware and its data belongs to you. we dont have any monthly or hidden costs.

4

Thanks guys.
The MQTT gateway is WIFI Only? Hard wired Ethernet is preferred in my environment. We do run an MQTT Broker (Chariot) so I think were good there.

5

Currently our only MQTT Gateway is WiFi. We have plans to develop an Ethernet based MQTT Gateway, however the development for that is quite extensive. Currently we are working to develop a Cellular MQTT Gateway which is our main focus in this development scope.

There are however alternative options for an Ethernet MQTT Gateway. It’s possible you could use a Raspberry Pi along with one of our RPi XBee shields and an XBee module. You can run Node Red on the RPi and essentially create an MQTT Ethernet Gateway that way. It would not however be PoE.