Tracking Snow Fall at the Laurel Highlands Snowmobile Club with ioBridge and MaxBotix Range Sensors

January 23, 2014 By

The polar vortex may have bundled up this week, but if you are into riding snowmobiles, then get out to the trails since there is 8.7 inches of snow out there!

ioBridge Snow Meter LHSC

The members of the Laurel Highlands Snowmobile Club (LHSC) created a system of cameras and wireless level sensors connected to the Internet with ioBridge Cloud Services to provide real-time monitoring of snow levels on the snowmobile trails in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania. Knowing the snow levels means whether or not you show head to the trails or stay home. You need around 6 inches of snow to have a lot of fun. This is a great professional application of ioBridge technology and internet connected services. We use the very same technology in our TideAlerts.com system that monitors and alerts boaters of the time levels in Cape Cod.

“It’s not fun driving all the way out to the mountain to find out there is not enough snow to ride our snowmobiles,” said Bill Bennett, LHSC Member. “With the automated and wireless snow tracking system with ioBridge the snowmobile club members know exactly how much snow is on the trail.”

ioBridge Gamma with Wireless Endpoints System Overview

The ioBridge Gamma Web Gateway is designed for professional applications that require easy-to-install connectivity to remote sensors and controls commonly found in M2M applications. Once connected, your solution gets the benefit of the ioBridge Cloud Services such as Data Logging, Alerting, and Dashboards. Everything from orchard monitoring to alerting snow levels is possible with the ioBridge Gamma Web Gateway with Wireless Endpoints. Full documentation is available on ioBridge Connect.

ioBridge Wireless Endpoints System Overview

Getting Started

On ioBridge Connect, we have created a complete tutorial on how to use the MaxBotix Range Sensor for measuring water or snow levels connect to ioBridge Cloud Services via the Gamma Web Gateway and Wireless Endpoints. We also have kits that include the Gamma Gateway and Wireless Endpoints for Sensors available on the ioBridge Store.

Happy Trails!

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

New Products and New Features = New Professional Solutions for Internet of Things and M2M Applications

April 24, 2013 By

New Products

We have exciting news for users and developers looking to build professional solutions for Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications. ioBridge released today the Gamma PRO Web Gateway and Wireless Endpoints for battery-powered, wireless sensor monitoring and control apps. These new products come with free ioBridge web services and mobile apps. The Gamma PRO Web Gateway with Wireless Endpoints are available now via the ioBridge Store.

“Our new products and features drastically lower the barrier to entry for professional and industrial applications that require low-cost, reliable, and secure performance to solve many M2M needs.”

iobridge Gamma Web Gateway and Wireless Endpoints App Diagram

New Features

In an effort to make our platform even easier to use, we have made it possible for users to create customizable dashboards and mobile interfaces for ioBridge and ioBridge PRO devices. This integration is available now at ioBridge.com/interface – all ioBridge and ioBridge PRO devices can be linked and registered to your ioBridge.com user account. This makes it really nice to have common dashboards, the ability to have devices send signals to each other, and make it simpler to manage as you add more devices.

One Dashboard for ioBridge and ioBridge PRO Devices

New ioBridge Dashboard

Don’t just monitor… introducing ioBridge Alerts.

Along with many other enhancements, we have added a new section for ioBridge Alerts. You now able to send ioBridge Alerts and see the latest alerts from the ioBridge Interface. We will soon be releasing an alerts widget so you can display alerts on your dashboard, mobile apps, or on a customized web app. Having your alerts displayed on the ioBridge Interface has the added benefit of making troubleshooting easier.

ioBridge Alerts

New Solutions

We consistently hear a need for battery-powered, wireless sensor and control solutions from our users, customers, and potential customers. We have spent a long time building a platform with our customers that addresses many professional application requirements. We are making our solutions low-cost and flexible enough for many solutions. So far users have built amazing solutions, including industrial garage door monitoring and control apps, pump and monitoring apps, remote sensor and environmental monitoring apps, water management systems, and agriculture control systems.

“Several of our professional customers have already built amazing, low-cost solutions for everything from tide level monitoring to water management in cities and towns.”

The Wireless Endpoints support battery operation of up to one year, solar charging circuit for Li-Poly battery packs, built-in temperature and humidity sensors, audio range testing, up to 1 mile operation using XBee-PRO radio modules, secure programming and pairing of XBee radios, latching control relay, and general support for external sensors.

Just think of what you can solve with having these new products and features available at a much lower-cost than competitive solutions but also have the ioBridge web services and mobiles apps included for free.

Contact us, visit our documentation site, or check out the ioBridge Store for more technical and purchasing information.

[via eReleases]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels

October 29, 2012 By

Just in case you haven’t heard, there is a giant storm heading towards the East Coast of the United States caused by Hurricane Sandy. If you need more evidence that something is going to happen, you can check out our tide level data that we collect from around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Storms of this size affect all kinds of weather system data such as pressure, temperature, and tide levels. A recipe for anticipating a major event is when you see the pressure drop and see a change in the amplitude of the tide levels. As you can see below, the tide levels are shifted upwards by 15″ to 20″. Please, stay safe! We will do the same thing as we button-down the hatches at ioBridge HQ.

Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels in Cape Cod

At one of the marinas, we have a security camera setup running off of an APC battery backup system. Here’s what really high tides look like.

Hurricane Sandy Tide Levels Security Cam

Here’s another photo of a dock submerged under water:

Hurricane Sandy Tides Dock Under Water

The system is running an ioBridge Gateway with connected battery-powered sensors over an XBee radio network. The tide level sensors are MaxBotix ultrasonic level sensors. Check out the Technology Review article, Cape Cod is Tweeting, Thanks to the Internet of Things, for more information about our tide project or contact us.

[via TideAlerts.com]

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Tide Sensors, Hurricane Irene, and the Internet of Things

August 29, 2011 By

As we announced last year, we have been running tide level points around Cape Cod to more accurately alert boaters about high and low tides. Our tide sites are connected to the Internet via the ioBridge platform. We also provide real-time alerts and tweets to boaters in Cape Cod and surrounding marinas.

One of our many TideAlerts.com subscribers had the idea to “watch” the tide levels during Hurricane Irene. After analyzing the data, we observed something interesting. The period of the tides did not change, but the amplitudes (the high tide and low tide marks) were greatly exaggerated as Hurricane Irene passed through Cape Cod.

The ioBridge tide project is another example of how the Internet of Things is emerging. We started this project 3 years ago and it provides an extremely useful service and is only possible by aggregating tons of sensor data and sharing it with users, developers, and researchers. This application is based on open data from NOAA and users monitoring environmental information and tries to find more meaning than just being a collection site of data.

By the way, here is what the tides looked like during Hurricane Irene at one of our public monitoring sites:

Tide Sensor Charts During Hurricane Irene

The good news is that by the time Hurricane Irene made it to Massachusetts, the storm was weak and all of our tide sensor sites survived.

Check out the Technology Review article, Cape Cod is Tweeting, Thanks to the Internet of Things, for more information about our tide project or contact us at support@iobridge.com.

Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

ioBridge Tide Alerts on MIT’s Technology Review Blog

June 15, 2010 By

MIT’s Technology Review blog features an article about our tide level application. Along with a few ioBridge customers, we setup tide monitoring sites in Cape Cod that measure tide levels and environmental data in real-time. The data collected is used to alert people in the area of rising or falling tide levels, so you know when to bring your boat back to the dock. The sites are part of our growing sensor and control network all over the world built on top of the ioBridge platform.

Green Pond Tide Monitoring Site

Green Pond Tide Monitoring Site

Christopher Mims, journalist at the MIT Technology Review, writes, “We’re talking about the Internet of Things. Using an ultrasonic level sensor to bounce sound waves off the sea surface in order to determine its height, an XBee radio to send that data to a receiver on shore, and most importantly, an ioBridge IO-204 to relay that information to servers in the cloud, Cape Cod resident and ioBridge hobbyist Robert Mawrey is able to broadcast to his entire community near real-time data on actual sea level.”

The technology behind the tide monitoring sites is based around the ioBridge platform. We will be releasing our Pro hardware and web services soon available for commercial products and services. The tide alerts site is just one example of the new things we have in store.

We collect the data on our demo site for everyone to take a look at and sign up for email/SMS alerts. We will be opening up the feeds for others to build applications. Visit tidealerts.com to check it out.

Tide Level Charts

Tide Level Charts

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,