How to design IoT system

Community Chit Chat
1

I’m in over my head, but I have a project with an economic problem that I believe can be solved by efficiency.

Does anyone have advice on how to accomplish the design of an IoT system that accomplishes the following:

  1. I need to access a remote location and control/monitor roughly 20 different locations that are spread over about a 1 mile by 1 mile area.

  2. I’m guessing that a RF analog method, accessed by (hopefully) 1 cellular point could accomplish this.

  3. I need to monitor liquid levels, pressure/vacuum, and maybe even short video and audio clips once a day.

  4. I need to be able to control electrical on/off switches, and/or VFD’s, that will mostly be determined by the monitored sensors.

  5. This all needs to be more cost effective than having a contractor drive to the locations and inspect every day.

Thanks for any advice!

2

Not an expert but…

Don’t know what you’re paying contractors, but this isn’t going to be cheap.

You’re probably looking at a cellular modem at each node or one cellular modem connected to a fiber optic or wireless LAN that connects all your nodes.

Regular WiFI isn’t going to cut it over those distances, you’d need professional wireless data radios and maybe a tower to mount antennas on if you go wireless. It would be easiest to build a fiber network between your nodes and then tie that into the internet cellularly or via satellite in a small data center on site.

And if your devices are mission critical and loss of connectivity could cause harm or damage, you need some redundancy built in in case you lose connectivity and that’s more money.

Be curious to see if anyone else has any recommendations, there could be a solution I’m not aware of available.

3

Thanks for the response! I’m going to chase down some costs estimates and study some more. Sure appreciate the help.

4

That’s a big project to build from scratch. I’d start by researching SCADA.