Hello,
I use 4 V3 vibration sensors which all have firmware 11. I’m trying to configure these sensors to read data once a minute. Out of 4 configured sensors, only 1 accepts to send data every minute. The best the other 3 can do is to send data every 5 minutes.
An idea of what might be causing this.
Thanks
Hi,
The minimum reporting interval of the V3 sensors is 5 minutes. You should not set it down to 1 minute.
The thought process behind this is that a motor or pump these devices are intended to monitor will not break down during a 5 minute period, rather they will degrade over a long period of time.
Hi,
As you can see, 1 of the sensors is sending data every minute. How can this be explained? By the firmware version?
That is a possibility. Version 9 is a bit outdated, we are at 16 now. I cannot remember when the minimum report frequency was set to 5 minutes. How long ago was this sensor purchased and what is the version of firmware in the other devices?
I can’t tell you exactly when the other sensors were purchased, but I can tell you that the firmware for these sensors is 11.
By the way, as an expert in industrial mechanical maintenance, I can confirm that reading vibration data every minute can be useful, especially as V3 vibration sensors can have an external power supply.
Here’s a very concrete example: one of our customers is a steel mill. All the furnaces in the steelworks have to be water-cooled. As a huge volume of water has to be available, the pumps (4) pump water directly from a river.
Sometimes, debris such as tree branches enters the pumps and can destroy them in less than 5 minutes. This can result in millions of dollars worth of damage. In this case, reading the vibration sensors every minute would save the pumps, but not every 5 minutes.
I don’t know why you eliminated the every-minute reading, but I think that for certain use cases it would be REALLY interesting if you reinstated this function.
Hi,
Yes, you are right. In applications like that, or shredders where solids could cause damage it makes sense to monitor in a short time frame. These V3 Vibration sensors however are intended more for predictive maintenance rather than abrupt unexpected fatal events. For a situation like that something like the asset monitor product might make more sense.
This device has a configurable acceleration interrupt with a range of 16mG to 15.3G. A product like this designed for interrupt would be better suited for an application like that. I will say however the form factor of the V3 sensors is probably betters suited to the industrial environment you’ve outlined. I will investigate the possible creation of a more “hardened” device to monitor sudden spikes in acceleration for applications like this with our team.
@Bhaskar
Thank you,
Travis Elliott
Thanks for the information Travis.
I must admit, however, that I don’t quite understand why you removed the ability to read data every minute from the V3 vibration sensor.
We already used V3 sensors with the old firmware to do predictive vibration analysis AND unpredictable breakage prevention as explained above. In my opinion, this added a lot of appeal to the sensor. Especially as the external power supply eliminates the impact on the batteries.
I think it may be difficult to explain to our customers that they need to install 2 vibration sensors per machine element, because of the change to the sensor. So, for us, the return of this function would be a really good thing. @Bhaskar
Thanks
We made the decision to remove the 1-minute interval with the best interests of our users in mind. Here’s the background:
We noticed that quite a few of our users were connecting 20-30 sensors to a single gateway and frequently requesting time-domain data at 1-minute intervals. Unfortunately, this heavy usage was causing significant congestion in the RF band, leading to network disruptions. Despite our continuous efforts, we consistently had 1 or 2 users engaging in this behavior every week, which put a strain on our technical support resources. To address this, we needed to discontinue support for the 1-minute interval.
However, please don’t worry if you only need processed sensor data! We’re here to help. We believe we can create a custom firmware version with a 1-minute interval specifically tailored to your needs. Just let us know how we can assist you further.
Thanks for the explanation. I now understand your point of view very well. So, for the current project, I’m going to explain the situation to the customer, who I think will understand.
For future projects with a need for minute-by-minute reading, I’ll contact you directly. We’ll see at that point how to proceed.
Thank you
