Environmental Sensor Network
Long-range, low-power sensor coverage across your facility — built in.
The Robot SCADA & IOT Server includes a complete sensor-network stack — a LoRaWAN network server, MQTT broker, payload decoders, and alarm engine — so distributed sensors plug in without standing up additional infrastructure. Coverage typically extends across an entire packhouse and surrounding cold stores from a single LoRa gateway.
Built-in LoRaWAN network server
Full ChirpStack v4 deployment runs alongside the application — gateway management, device provisioning, and downlink scheduling included. No external network server, no per-device cloud subscriptions.
Multi-protocol payload decoding
Per-MQTT-topic decoders for ChirpStack v4, The Things Network (TTN), and raw JSON payloads. Add support for new sensor families by configuring a decoder against the topic — no application redeploy required.
Alarm thresholds
Configurable upper and lower limits per measurement, with automatic flag-based alerting. Breaches generate structured events that route through the same alerting pipeline as service health.
Battery health tracking
Chemistry-aware voltage-to-percentage curves for Li-ion, LiFePO4, Alkaline, and NiMH cells, so battery readings translate to a meaningful state-of-charge — not just raw millivolts. Surfaces sensors due for replacement before they fail.
Per-entity rate limiting
Each sensor is rate-limited individually to prevent measurement flooding from a misbehaving device — protecting the database and downstream alerting from runaway publishers.
Time-series storage
Measurements land in PostgreSQL with the TimescaleDB extension, partitioned for fast range queries across millions of points. Grafana dashboards visualise trends per sensor, area, or container out of the box.
Supported transports
- LoRaWAN — long-range, low-power. A single gateway covers most packhouses; sensors run for years on a battery.
- MQTT — for Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or cellular sensors that publish directly to the on-site broker.
- BLE beacons — short-range, useful for asset tagging and location-aware applications.
All three converge on the same data model, so dashboards, alarms, and exports treat them identically downstream.
How a measurement flows
Sensor → LoRa Gateway → ChirpStack → MQTT → Server → TimescaleDB → Grafana
↓
Alarm engine → Event log → Alertmanager
The pipeline is end-to-end traced with OpenTelemetry, so any latency or drop along the path is attributable to a specific stage.
Operational visibility
- Per-sensor health — last-seen timestamp, packet-loss trend, RSSI/SNR (LoRa), and battery state-of-charge.
- Per-area dashboards — temperature, humidity, and alarm status grouped by warehouse area, with playlist cycling for wall-mounted displays.
- Audit trail — every threshold breach, sensor offline transition, and battery-low warning is captured as a structured event for after-the-fact review.
Why it matters
Cold-chain and packhouse operations live or die by their environmental data. A built-in sensor network means deployments don’t depend on third-party cloud services that can lapse, change pricing, or lose connectivity at the wrong moment. Everything stays on-premise — your sensors talk to your server, on your network, under your control.
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