Shack IoT

The Shack IoT project's aim is to provide a powerful, yet easy, way to manage and process real time data by leveraging new technologies in the Internet‑of‑Things.

Our current focus utilizes and open source project (created by IBM) called ‘Node‑RED’. Node‑RED is a web browser based technology that talks to your real time data and provides a graphical interface to process and display the data. It’s simple drag and drop interface allows you to quickly prototype the logic for an entire data acquisition system (called a flow) without having to know anything about SCADA or PLC programming.
In the simplest case you can create a custom HMI dashboard to view your data in a standard web browser in a matter of minutes.

The best part is that Node‑RED runs on the Node.js stack giving you the freedom to run on either a Windows box or a low cost embedded Linux device such as a $35 ‘Raspberry Pi’. For less than $100 in hardware you can setup Node‑RED to run in your data rack. Actually the best part is Node‑Red is open source and free!

Node‑Red nodes are extensible (and that’s where we come in) we create nodes that are useful to well testing, encapsulating the tedious calculations, into a concise node that you can drop into your flow, feed data in and get processed data out.

Examples of some of our current Node‑RED nodes in development:

• Rack node

  The rack node allows you to average high frequency real time data, providing both an averaged output (that can be processed by other nodes in the flow) and a visual display in the form of a data table. The node handles multiple inputs that are individually averaged by a user configured period ranging from 1 minute to 1 hour. A typical use case would be to take high frequency (1 second) data and output period averages where the period would match the sample period of your flow notes i.e. 1 second data averaged down to 15 minute readings.

• Diagram node

  The diagram node takes in real time data and displays it visually in the form of a scalable vector graphics image with live digital readings. The node includes a diagram of a wellhead, manifold and separator with the ability to specify a user defined diagrams in the form of a 'marked-up' Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file.

Shack IoT is an ongoing project; we have only scratched the surface with what can be done here... THINGS EVOLVE QUICKLY... So check back here periodically to see what’s new!

Node-RED on a Raspberry Pi for in shack monitoring... it’s quite simply “PRETTY COOL...” and the start of something new!

You can download or learn more about Node‑RED by visiting: nodered.org
And don’t hesitate to contact us we would welcome the discussion of “where this can go...”