
Scenario
- Environment: Personal / Commercial / Industrial
- Customer wants to have up to date weather data for their area that can be logged / trended for later retrieval.
- Optional Internal Temperature Reading for Trending Status.
- Ability to control an external system on extreme setpoints.
- Option to Predict Future Weather for several days.
On-Site Inspection
- Customer has BAS (Building Automated System) not connected to Internet.
- Various zones that are Thermal Sensitive with Humidity Influence.
- Various Outside Air Temperature (OAT) sensors, some connected to the BAS.
- Customer doesn’t want the BAS To communicate with the outside world (Security Issues and I.T. policy’s).
- Suggested to Customer to also have the BAS to communicate with the extra hardware (via intranet and SQL data).
- Customer also wants the screen results to be displayed in the CEO’s, CIO’s and the Production Managers Offices.
Solution
- To keep costs down, 3x Raspberry Pis were acquired with LCD screens.
- Fully secure Lynx OS were installed into the PI’s.
- Web Scripts were installed to get area weather for the site.
- Custom software was written in Python for each Pi.
- Through the I.T.’s networking gateways, one Pi was able to acquire the weather data for the area and store it onto an internal SQL data server for all 3 Pi’s.
- Another custom script was written for the BAS to get access to the SQL weather data.
- The SQL data server handled all the trending for the weather data.
Conclusion
- 3x locations in the company now have up to date weather data for the area.
- Each screen can display warnings based on user-configured set-points.
- Multi-Color Screens act based on set-points.
- Data is Trended for Retrieval on the SQL Data Server (Customer Supplied).
- BAS has connection to weather data without sacrificing security policy’s.
- Using the BAS weather prediction can be achievable, but not under this scope.
- By using the Raspberry Pis energy usage is minimal (less than a standard computer) with all the power of a dedicated system and can be replaced with minimal costs.