Sometimes, no matter how much you don’t want it to happen, the power goes out for a few minutes.
Or, heaven forbid, your internet connection is disrupted, delayed, or goes away for a few minutes. Sometimes we wonder how did we ever live without the internet always available?
In the end, some things are just beyond your control. However, this possibility of a temporary loss of internet connectivity is a big deal in Industrial IoT, where your organization is remotely monitoring sensors and critical assets that are critical for your needs.
How do we fix it?? You’ll learn just how in these here step-by-step tutorial instructions.
This write-up is about the Tools.Valarm.net / Valarm Tools Cloud Websockets feature that gives you the power to store data locally, to local memory built in to your data loggers on your Yoctopuce sensors, so that just in case your internet connectivity goes out for a little bit (e.g., 3G GSM mobile cell network connection might be dodgy or spotty) – you won’t lose your precious IIoT sensor information!
Your sensor hubs will retrieve and upload all of your missing sensor data the next time connection is available. Note that this feature is in early alpha and beta testing, so if you don’t have access, and want to test it out, knowing that there are risks involved, then please don’t hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net.
You can use this feature with sensor hubs that connect to Tools.Valarm.net via:
1. Just in case this is your 1st time, let’s start from scratch and link a new Yoctopuce sensor hub device to Tools.Valarm.net.
These first steps for creating a new device are also more elaborately covered in the How To Use Valarm video.
If you’ve already got your sensor hubs connected to Tools.Valarm.net and made new Yoctopuce API devices then you can skip down a bit to where you see 6.
2. Create your Yoctopuce API device then copy the Routing Code from Configure Hardware -> Inbound API.
Then paste that routing code into your outgoing callback configuration screen in virtualhub. Make sure your sensor hub is connected to the internets and click Test Now to verify that everything is A-OK.
3. Under Configure Hardware -> Configure Yocto Hub set up your sensors and map them to the sensor columns / fields you want. Note that you can later remap / rename / set up aliases following these instructions.
4. Set up your Hub Config tab to the post interval you want. Here we’ve set the post interval to 120 seconds. This means that your sensor hub will check in with Tools.Valarm.net every 2 minutes and upload what needs to be uploaded. Even if your internet connection temporarily disappears your sensor hub will continue trying every 2 minutes until the end of time or the moon crashes into the earth.
5. Now we’ve got Industrial IoT sensor data flowing from the field to Valarm Tools Cloud / Tools.Valarm.net.
6. Next up is the fun, new stuff for setting up Websockets do that none of your precious sensor data is ever lost!
Go to the Advanced Config tab like you see in the screenshot and click the question mark ( ? ) buttons to get help and detailed descriptions for all of the settings.
7. Click the checkbox next to enable datalogging.
You’ll see the options for:
- Setting the sensor hardware data recording rate
- Setting the Interval for how often event collection happens
- Applying averaging to recorded data
The help menus for these options are included in these screenshots for your convenience so you can learn more about exactly what they do.
8. With the settings above we’ve set the post interval to 120 seconds / 2 minutes so the sensor hub will check in every couple minutes. In this next step we’ll set the data recording rate to 2 times per minute. This means sensor data will be written locally to the sensor module (e.g., Meteo or Light sensor) twice per minute a.k.a. every 30 seconds. Think of it as how often a backup is being written locally to the memory on your Yoctopuce sensor module.
9. We’ll set the event collection interval to 60 seconds meaning an event or row of data in Tools.Valarm.net is made every 60 seconds or each minute. So you’ll have up to the minute sensor data readings. Now, if the hub tries to check in every 2 minutes it’ll have 2 rows / pieces of data to send to Tools.Valarm.net. In the case that internet connectivity is lost for some reason, all of the data is saved locally and the hub will upload all of the historical data and backfill the Valarm Tools Cloud data log next time the internet is available during 1 of the sensor hub’s routine 2 minute check-ins to Tools.Valarm.net. Make sense? If not, please don’t ever hesitate to contact us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions!
10. Now that we’ve configured the datalogger settings click the Switch to Websockets button, say OK, and save! That’s it. You’re good to go. Let’s test it out next after we’ve saved and switched to Websockets.
11. Here we’ve got data uploading with the settings we set up above for Websockets and data logging. The last sensor data record row was received by Valarm Tools Cloud at 15:12:07.
We can take the WiFi hub offline by connecting it to a bogus WiFi network ‘abc’ that doesn’t actually exist where we’re at. We’ll leave it like that for a few minutes, then connect it back to the internets with the real WiFi network and see the sensor data backfilled from the data logger once a connection to Tools.Valarm.net is detected and restored.
12. Now a few minutes later at 15:16:30 we reconnect our sensor hubs to the interwebs and wa-la! like magic the historical data is filled in from the data logger. It’s like we never lost connection to the internet. Hallelujah, none of our IIoT remote monitoring info has been lost! Excellent. All of the data is there from each Event Collection Interval, which we set to 60 seconds above, so we’ve got all our minute by minute sensor measurements. Nothing’s lost.
Have a look at our Customer Stories page to see how this is critical and useful for remote monitoring in a variety of industries, from water resources management to industrial vehicle fleets, to flood warning systems and water quality, for governments, Smart Cities, businesses, and other organizations around the world.
Also see our Web Dashboards for real-time Industrial IoT sensor monitoring on any of your devices that have a web browser, like your phones and tablets!
Questions?
Ready to help your bottom line and save your time and your money?
We’re here and ready to help you, your teams, and your organization deploy your most effective monitoring systems.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.
