Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Trends are moving towards making smarter operating decisions based on actionable information, whether you're in the manufacturing space, oil/gas, power/utilities or other industries where outside variables can substantially impact the bottomline.

Having access to current and historical information on all of those outside variables is key to having "smart" operations that maximize profits in the most efficient manner possible.

We're going to discuss several sources of such important outside variables that, in the past, may have been difficult to integrate into a control system such as an HMI, SCADA or MES and how they are now available in an easy-to-consume, JSON RESTful web services format.

With the majority of companies in the oil, gas, railroad, water, wastewater, mining and power/utilities industries requiring wide area distributed radio networks for communications, engineers in charge of these radio networks have the daunting task of maintaining the highest level of performance and uptime at all times.

Given that you're reading this, I will choose to make the assumption that you are either an engineer in charge of such a radio network or that you've had some interaction on some level with such a radio network and it may not have been an altogether pleasant experience.

We're going to discuss a few things to keep in mind if you're interested in getting the most uptime possible out of your serial radios (and, let's face it, why wouldn't you want that).