Industrial livestock operations have several critical needs in order to function smoothly, but perhaps most important is also the most fundamental: water. On remote sites, tank level monitoring and automation are tools that can essentially make or break the entire operation.
In many of these situations, the needs of the site managers are different, so in order to maximize the technology being deployed to drive the automation process, they need to be able to customize the functionality. For operations using radio communication networks, those radios need to provide maximum programmability in order to host third party applications specific to the needs of the site managers.
We recently finished a deployment that serves as an excellent case study for remote site tank monitoring deployments and included some interesting uses of radio programmability:
The operator of a Rocky Mountain based livestock facility approached FreeWave to assist in remote data visualization of water tanks that are vital to its operations. The pain point was that the tank levels could only be observed visually on premise. After consideration of the terrain (mountainous, remote and big temperature swings), sensors and communications infrastructure, FreeWave engineers recommended ZumLink IPR with the Node-RED programming language for intelligent tank data visualization via browser or mobile device.
The facility has minimal to zero staff most of the time. If a fault occurs such as a leak that prevents a tank from filling, the facility operators are unaware until they visually inspect the remote faulty tank, located a half mile from property headquarters. The operators wanted to reduce the number of trips to the tank facility and remotely monitor all tanks via web-based browser or mobile device.
For the complete case study, visit this link: https://www.freewave.com/case-studies/remote-tank-monitoring-automation/.