Mobapi.BOX, our production data collector.
A few months ago, the team was given a tall order: make the power generation data of an industrial system readable on a mobile, when that system was never designed to connect to the internet. Challenge met: the answer has taken the form of a unit, the Mobapi.BOX.
Connecting a system from before the web.
The first visit to the customer’s site showed the scale of the challenge. The systems to be monitored remotely were created before the web was invented. The production data had to be extracted from their printer output, then fed into dashboards powered by Mobapi’s APIs.
Hundreds of pages of documentation, a lot of research and some help from specialists later, the team combined its electronics and computing skills to create a new piece of data collection equipment. It was designed to be generic enough to serve other energy producers who want to maintain their equipment better.
A read-only unit.
The Mobapi.BOX, the size of a large smartphone, collects the data produced by power generation systems. It processes that data right next to the equipment, before sending it to our cloud infrastructure.
It runs on its own and lets data through in one direction only, to keep the systems secure. Placed as close as possible to the equipment, it is configured to transmit read-only, and it maintains a secure web connection by itself. Mobapi’s other building blocks then take over: data storage and processing, API configuration, then dashboards and charts.
Several sources already.
The BOX already provides remote monitoring of equipment run by Micronet and General Electric control systems, and other connectors are in the works. For smart buildings, the team has also developed compatibility with MQTT, MySQL and Legrand EcoCompteur.
The aim: to open up isolated data without heavy infrastructure costs, and at last make it available on the move, within the security constraints of energy producers.
