A delivered example: vineyard covers controlled remotely
A manufacturer of retractable vineyard covers wanted to offer its customers monitoring of their plots. Each plot is driven by a Niagara Edge 10 controller, reachable on site or through the vendor tool, at forty-five seconds per request.
We wrote a BACnet/IP driver that reads the weather sensors, the thresholds, the position and fault code of each row, and sends deploy and retract commands, in under two seconds. On top, a web and mobile platform: history in a time-series database, alerts, four permission levels, multi-estate. The controller's automatic safeties, frost, hail, rain, wind, always take priority over a manual command.
The protocols we speak
- BACnet/IP: building and equipment controllers, Tridium Niagara, Distech, Siemens.
- Modbus TCP and RTU: meters, drives, industrial PLCs.
- OPC UA and MQTT: gateways and recent devices.
- LoRaWAN: low-power sensors over large areas, with a private ChirpStack network where public coverage is missing.
- 4G and constrained links: outage-tolerant collection, deferred upload, controlled data usage.
What separates useful monitoring from one more dashboard
- Data is reliable: every point carries its timestamp and quality; missing data is information, not a hole.
- Alerts are useful: few, calibrated with operators, each with an expected action.
- Control is safe: never by bypassing the equipment's safeties, always logged, with per-person rights.
- It works in the field: on a phone, with a poor connection, by someone wearing gloves.
And where AI fits
Once data is collected and stored, it serves more than curves: detecting drift before a breakdown, forecasting consumption, correlating weather and operation. We do not promise it at the start; we first build clean collection, without which no AI is worth anything. When the time comes, integration happens on your real data.
What it costs
A communication driver on a real device takes a few days and removes most of the uncertainty. A complete platform, collection, history, application, alerts, represents a few weeks of engineering, then a monthly operations fee. We always start with the driver: if it does not talk to your equipment, you know before committing to the rest.
References
- ANSSI's guide on industrial control-system cybersecurity: good practice for connecting a controller without exposing it.
- NIS2 for SMEs: the obligations that also reach industrial installations.
- Our Industry offer: automation, monitoring, business applications for manufacturers.