Hi,
we have purchased a Robustel Industrial Edge computing gateway EG5120 series unit and NCD dry contact sensor PR52-18_CC and we are trying to get to communicate together to monitor water flow rates, using NodeRed as the analytics platform
I have configured the robustel EG5120 to the ethernetwork no problem, (it runs version 2.1.1 firmware)
it has a ‘Xbee’ antenna point, but so far i cant find any instructions in how to operate that interface or configure it.
so the first question is can this edge gateway device operate as the ‘USB RF modem’ this is mentioned in some documentation?
or is it essential that we also have a USB RF modem device? → to configure the ncd contact sensor device.
the second question is - is 2.1.1 the latest firmware for this unit? - i can see version of ‘R5120’ series up to v 5.x…but the model number isn’t a exact match.
First here is the user guide for the Enterprise Gateway:
That will show you how to access the Node-Red web interface. It will already have a flow deployed with a Wireless Gateway Node connected to a debug node. If you click the small bug icon button in the upper right corner it will bring up the Debug panel. Now if you close a contact on one of the inputs with a jumper wire you should see data printed to the debug panel. This is the first step in testing. Let me know if you are able to see data in the debug panel. If not make sure antennas are connected to the Gateway and the Input device.
okay that’s good - after doing that, I have now got dry contact closure events showing in the debug window in NodeRed.
they do appear to be talking to each other and I can see separate events for both open and close of contacts for each of the 7 contacts.
i think i needed to hold in the CFG button on the ncd sensor - it seemed to work pretty much straight after that.
its entirely weird that none of the Edge gateway ROS PRO web management console has any configuration or status pages for the XBEE interface…yet it works… and it only shows activity in node red.
(side note - the flow code example is not for the 7 contact unit - its for a 2 contact type sensor device, but its fairly straight forward to edit and get it working.)
so we got that working to send us a dashboard output,
however I’m not able to work out how to get ‘flow rate’ of water through each input,
we have 1 hall-effect sensor [YF-DN40] connected to each dry contact - so, we are anticipating that the hall-effect sensor is sending a pulse for each unit of water - in effect an ‘open and a close’ of each contact.
we previously had these connected to Audino devices, but were unsupportable in the longer term, so we are trying to use off the shelf open standards tech that we can support by our tech volunteers.
can you point me at a code example that uses node red to read the input and increment the counter etc over time to get flow rate per input?
I took a look at your flow. It looks like you are splitting the inputs, then using flow variables to increase counters. Can you tell me what about the flow specifically is not working?
yes we are splitting out each input as a topic that can then be counted - we are trying to identify water flow rate and any sustained flows - ie burst pipe or tap left running conditions.
we have made some progress on the node red flows,
in looking at the data being received by the node red gateway - we recognized that we are using a hall effect sensor that sends a 5volt dc digital pulse per volume of water - however the sensor is a dry contact sensor - it seems to be detecting the changes of state but we are not sure if it is capable of seeing the digital pulses and count them… ? does the dry contact sensor (PR52-18_CC) handle this 5vdc digital pulse as a ‘open/close’ event? and will it send one event message for each change of state ie digital pulse?
