Custom Interfaces and IoT

No matter how new your electronics equipment is, it always seems as though the world is moving so fast that you don’t have the type of interface you need. That is true with both home entertainment and industrial equipment. Even worse, as much of a challenge as evolving physical connections may be, software compatibility and capabilities present more of a challenge. Omicron stands ready to help.

Omicron is accustomed to living on the leading edge and is ready help visionary companies bring their dreams to market. If the physical components for an interface exist and the functional objectives for the software are defined, Omicron can envision and build the software interface that will enable the new system.

One custom interface that Omicron engineered and constructed was to serve a provider of oilfield production intelligence. It had developed subsurface sensors for wells to measure and manage the flow of individual chemicals to enable the economic depletion of hydrocarbons. These sensors, plus reservoir sensors, are to be spread over a very wide geographic area and need to deliver their data continuously to a central PI server. The company faced a challenge, as no standard interface was flexible enough to accommodate the hardware architecture, data network, and variety of data types, nor could any available interface automatically provision the sensors for data collection.

Omicron helped the company design, construct and test a custom interface to handle real-time data from tens of thousands of geographically dispersed sensors through a single PI interface. To simplify the provisioning of each device, the custom interface reads provisioning data from each device when first put on-line and automatically generates an AF structure and PI points for the collection without human intervention. Additionally, the interface provides a mechanism to send commands from the PI system to the devices for a variety of purposes, including interface software updates.

Creating such custom interfaces requires deep engineering knowledge of PI and communications protocols, in addition to understanding the target application’s requirements. Omicron’s ability to envision and create custom interfaces for PI is unmatched in the industry due to its experienced staff that span many engineering and science disciplines.

Clients call on Omicron to innovate, reduce complexity, slash maintenance and improve reliability.  Our experienced PI, .NET and SharePoint team has made many contributions to the world of PI applications through our technical vision and recognition of possibilities that others do not see.