Piscada solution brings all the power to the edge, with a distributed IoT infrastructure on site.
Data driven functions like alarm handling and data logging are also local.
This is a main difference to conventional SCADA solutions.

The objective is to have a very powerful monitor and control solution applied to systems on a single physical location. Think of a solar power plant, a small power generation site, a complex home automation system, or industrial site. Cases where you want to have local control and remote access, but no need to interact or correlate between sites at different locations.

The capabilities and power of small local computers have evolved so much that we now can have a very powerful “control center” on a single board device, credit card size. (see Raspberry Ecosystem)

This solution’s central system is based on the Raspberry Pi cpu.
The software is installed and runs in this Linux environment, fully solid state with no mechanical drives.

It includes an SQL database that handles all the information related to all the field information we need to process. Application programming is developed in python and takes advantage of the large library of code available for this setup.
A single RPi can be equipped with several I/O modules directly controlled by its pins, but this is not the man objective. The main goal is to use the distributed hardware based on the same family or other compatible devices.

Another important module to enable communication on the local network is a MQTT broker solution that enables all the devices to communicate with each other on a publish subscribe architecture. We use the Mosquitto broker for it’s functionality and wide spread use that guarantees its maintenance and evolution.

This opens the piscada module to communicate with any device that supports MQTT even if they are not one of the pirtu units.
All this is defined in the SQL database presented above. Each digital or analog entity can have a MQTT definition that allows piscada to either publish or subscribe that entity on a specific MQTT “address” defined as an organized set of TOPICS and a variable name.

In the case of any pirtu unit the internal application allows for a seamless connection without any field configuration. Each pirtu at powerup connects to the local network as usual in new IoT devices.
Using wifi, the unit first generates a local wifi SSID, called “piscadawifi”, and the installer uses a phone or tablet to join that network and address a fixed ip on his browser. There he selects the wifi SSID required on that site and introduces its password. Done.

The pirtu now reaches out to the main piscada on the network and receives a set of information that defines the TYPE of device that the piscada expects to have at that particular MAC address.
This allows for an important software characteristic – we can have a single source code for all types of pirtu and activate the parts that are specific for that IoT device.

Another set of data from the SQL database is passed to the pirtu to define the mapping of its local variables, specific for that TYPE of pirtu, to the MQTT communication parameters, the TOPICS and SIGNAL name(s) needed.

So when you are defining the piscada database you are at the same time and without further actions, defining the database of all pirtu s.

Having all this capability on site, what do we need to have remotely to allow for supervision and control?

We need a remote SQL access ONLY to the sets of information we are using on a certain user screen.
There is no heavy communication between a remote control center and a set of remote units.

This is what the piscada cloud solution offers.

All you need is a piscada cloud account. You login to our cloud and then specifically to one of your piscada sites. Once this connection is established the cloud solution requests information from the remote database as needed. You access your SCADA solution from anywhere in the world with a phone, tablet or laptop, or a fixed device with multiple screens. All you need and use is a browser, and a piscada account.