Simple SCADA via Xbee mesh

Hi, I am looking at pricing a system whereby the customer (Irrigation company) wants to monitor 20 - 30 canal gates in a scheme, covering an area approx 30km long by 20km wide. All that is required at this stage is monitoring 2 digital inputs, and being able to log into a webpage to see the states of these. I was thinking of using Xbee S3B’s in a mesh system as have been involved in a similar scheme and was very impressed with their performance.
So my questions are

  1. At each site I need something to go between the switch and Xbee, Arduino?
  2. At the end point (co-ordinator) how do I send the data from the radio network to a web page?

Any and all suggestions appreciated,
Thanks, Craig

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Craig,

If you want an XBee Network, NCD’s Push-Button Notification Wireless sensor will allow you to monitor 2 inputs Link
These are battery powered units that normally Sleep, until an input changes, or during a scheduled status update.
You can program them to Wake Up and send the status however often you’d like.

As you know, you would also need to have an Xbee Router that was powered 24/7 at each site, to create the Mesh Network.

I cant speak for NCD, but I “think” they are working on a XBee Router that’s battery powered with Solar Panel Recharging.

Since the Solar Router isn’t performing the measurements, you can raise the Xbee Router 20-30’ in the air for a significant increase in the RF performance for the Mesh Network since you need to cover such a large area.

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Hi Craig,

I think the battery powered Push Button Notification units @rfontaine suggested are an excellent recommendation. They use S3B Mesh modules and have an on board CPU so no need for Arduino. As Ryan said they send out transmissions on input change so they should work perfectly fine for monitoring the digital outputs from the canal gates you have.

The central receiver is where we do not have an “off the shelf” solution just yet. Many users like Ryan have developed a central gateway device to receive the transmissions from the Push Notification boards. This central gateway device can be almost anything from a Windows server to a Raspberry Pi, pretty much anything that can link up to an S3B module and listen for data. @Trey is working on node libraries for Node-Red which is very interesting. Using Node-Red and Node-Red-Dashboard you could easily setup a central gateway with a web interface for viewing the status of the remote inputs, and better yet it can run on almost anything(Windows PC, Linux PC, Mac, Raspberry Pi, etc).

Please let us know if you have any questions on this.

Thank you,
Travis Elliott