SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

Illustration by Chris Philpot

The word drone may sounds related to any contemporary sci-fi flicks, or images of attacks carried out remotely on hostile lands, or even your high-school biology teacher’s voice. We don’t expect a drone to help us save water, but that’s what Arad Metering Technologies intends to do. The Israeli company’s battery-operated drone is one of the novel tools it’s deploying to help consumers and companies conserve H₂O — and to make money.

Such an idea would come out of Israel is no coincidence. The country is poor in water and rich in tech innovation, much of it born of constant military conflict. Israel pioneered the use of unmanned aerial vehicles after it lost many fighter jets in the 1973 war. But Arad’s drones don’t fight: They read data from the company’s patented water-meter system to detect leakage or, in irrigation systems, drought.

The World Bank estimates that water wastage costs utilities $14 billion a year worldwide; in developing countries, 200 million more people could be served by the water lost to leaks and theft. Arad CEO Dan Winter says this is largely a consequence of how the business works in places where water is cheap or untaxed: “You train people to abuse water because they pay very little.”

Photos courtesy of Arad Technologies LTD

With this innovation, instead of meter reading - it can provide real time monitoring of water supply infrastructures. Its technology can find irregularities — a pipe failure, an unusually low flow rate, or a too-constant one that could indicate a leak — in a few hours, rather than every 60 days as with a typical meter reading.

Arad’s system is built around what looks like a standard meter. The difference is on the inside, where you’ll find 3G wireless technology, a microcontroller, and 20-year batteries. Every 11 to 30 seconds, the system transmits data, which can be picked up by a drone (best for quickly covering big distances in remote areas) or by a drive-by or fixed-base reader. The data are then analyzed by computer to gauge how much water has been consumed, how much was lost, and even where tampering may have taken place. As a result, companies can save both water and man hours.

The possibilities for Arad’s services go far beyond water should be covering abilities to monitor everything from municipal infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to security-camera networks — basically any complex system prone to localized failures and waste. Arad has its own way, to proof drones could be associated with saving, not destroying; life, not death.

Courtersy: Tree Hugger, Fast Company

Roughly, at $20 to build? This 9 digit pulse counter is an excellent example of home built tools. Josh, the builder found himself repairing a device and in need of a pulse counter. With the components cheaply available, he just built his own. He says that it has a few limitations, like display brightness, but overall it seems to do the job well. All the stuffs, steps and even PCB can be downloaded from his site at your own will.

Courtesy of Imsolidstate

To some crowds, irrigating a small garden is a relatively relaxing and sometimes therapeutic activity, well if you are a botany/biology nerd or desperately really need a hobby - but going away for any length of time can present a problem. The simple solution of course is to purchase a hose-bib/timer package from Home Depot for about $30 and set up a small drip system to efficiently water each plant or row of plants (rather than a wasteful sprinkler system). Going along with conserving water is using a rain barrel collection system to capture rain for later use thus eliminating or more likely reducing treated water consumption.

Adding a rain barrel complicates the system significantly as there isn’t much water pressure at its spigot compared to a standard city spigot which has somewhere around 40 psi. Also, if the barrel is empty, you don’t want your plants to die and thus you need to be able to detect that the barrel is empty and switch to city water.

Courtesy: HAXORYOURMOTHERHARDRIVE

When the Department of Natural Resources of Australia decided that they needed to capture data about the natural flooding of a cave, they turned to a hacker to get results. The goal was to photograph the area during these floods with an automated system. In the end, they used a gutted Lumix digital camera mounted in a trash can, covered in aluminium foil. Though it sounds a bit silly, the final product turned out quite nice. You can see the build log, schematics, and results on the project page.

In this case the event they are trying to capture pictures of a cave flood with a Flood Triggered Automated Camera System. The system consists of a camera that is connected to a moisture sensor so that the a camera can start taking pictures when the sensor gets wet. Pictures will continue to be taken every 15 minutes until the moisture levels go back to normal. Since it is being installed in a remote location it needed to be self sustaining.

The water sensor is an interesting design since it has the ability of killing the power to the entire system when the conditions are dry. This is done by using a Darlington transistor feeding a relay.

Courtesy of Penguins Lab

The Cheap Vegetable Gardner wanted more automation than their previous PS2 controller based grow system. This time they set out to design a full featured, compact grow controller that can measure temperature and humidity as well as control a heat lamp, fan, and water pump. An Arduino provides USB connectivity and interfaces the solid state relays and sensors. The assembled project all fits in a box but we are left wondering how much heat the four SSRs generate and will it be a problem?

source: hackaday

Sometime, the GPRS coverage & priority issue is a turning down subject in our AVLS operations. Despite of GPS data errors and interferences, we choose to add SMS  mode for failsafe function to our AVLS architecture. It’s not really a big deal to develope the back engine, but in considering the alarm dispacthing functions. Maybe, it will become another turning down factor in our bussiness. the dispatcher should be really intelligent to determine the raw data despite of many of uncertainty factors that always bother. We bought a quad-core dell 1U rack server in order to replace our old beloved application server, a 4 pentium 4 Dell 5U tower server. We done doing upgrades to database server, and now working on the back-end & front-end application test. In another hand, we are migrating the Telemery System for waterworks…. developing a friendly GUI for Flood Monitoring System plus testing the alarm dispatching functions, still handling data loses in ABB EM meters integrations… sigh!

Telegesis UK has won a major order to supply its advanced Zigbee module products to TBN Energoservice of Russia TBN Energoservice specialises in the development of automatic meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems using the latest technical developments.

TBN is implementing a major wireless water AMR system based on ZigBee radio technology.The system uses ZigBee mesh networking software and silicon delivered in module form via the ETRX2 module produced by Telegesis.In Russia, domestic water has traditionally been preheated in dedicated power plants and pumped directly to consumer’s apartments.

TBN is implementing a major wireless water AMR system based on ZigBee radio technology. The system uses ZigBee mesh networking software and silicon delivered in module form via the ETRX2 module produced by Telegesis. In Russia, domestic water has traditionally been preheated in dedicated power plants and pumped directly to consumer’s apartments. Read more on this article…

RS Hydro have recently won two seperate contracts to supply anWater Quality Sonde with Remote Monitoring Telemetry Troll Link Systemd install the Troll 9500 multiparameter water quality sonde in remote locations in Wales. Two further units are being supplied as stand-alone platforms.

The clients are using the Troll 9500 XP Professional platform along with the Troll Link solar powered telemetry system with plug and play sensors including turbidity, level, temperature, conductivity and pH/ORP. One of the clients is using the Troll 9500 to provide an early warning alarm to inform the client if any of their remedial works on a dam face are having an influence on the water quality of the compensation flow from the reservoir. The other client is using 4 units to measure water quality in a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) over a period of two years.

Both clients are using RS Hydro’s FlowView platform to provide all the data on a daily basis. Should any of the alarm thresholds be exceeded, text (SMS) messages will be sent direct to the client. It is possible to view a demo of the Troll 9500 on our local river. Before you think there are errors in the conductivity readings, they are correct! The Salwarpe RIver is partly fed by Droitiwch Spa’s naturally occuring brine baths, hence at low flows, conductivity rises dramatically.

Source: RS Hydro

“The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over finite resources between individual interests and the common good.”

- Wikipedia

In a perfect world, we all understand that certain situations should not exist which put our critical infrastructure at risk — we all like to be able to have electricity, water, and other common utilities which we normally take for granted.

But we do not live in a perfect world, of course.

First, let’s look at the issue of “convergence”, or rather, “premature convergence” which seems to be a better definition:

“…premature convergence means that a population for an optimization problem converged too early, resulting in being suboptimal.”

- Wikipedia

This is similar to — what I believe to be — the situation wherein some unknown portion of the SCADA controls & operations community has strategically moved itself into: using the same platforms, operating systems, and software, which are now susceptible to the vulnerabilities that we all know too well. Buffer overflows, remote exploitation, denial of service vulnerabilities, and so forth and so on.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if these system were, in no uncertain terms, not connected to the Internet in any way, shape, or form.

But that is increasingly not the case.

Due to operational “optimization” (meaning: it is cheaper to use publicly available connectivity to manage these systems), the SCADA threat landscape now begins to look a lot like the network security landscape that we all know and respect — one of constant vigilance and constant defensive threat posture.

Within the past couple of days, there have been a couple of SCADA systems management platform vulnerabilities announced which could result in some rather serious exploitation. The SANS ISC reported yesterday a situation in which one software suite which “…provides unauthorized access, allows partial confidentiality, integrity, and availability violation, allows unauthorized disclosure of information, allows disruption of service.”

This seems rather serious. And I have been informed that there is at least one more similar vulnerability which has not been publicly disclosed yet.

As utility companies make operational decisions based on economic business savings (using the Internet, or an Internet VPN, to manage their client-control base to save money), the unintended consequences can be severe. When they occur. If they occur.

Throw the dice.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the SCADA community quickly comes to grips with the nature of network security.

Source: TrendsLab Malmware Blog

Trust me, I never heard any kind of phrase such of that. NRW is stand for Non-revenue water, generally can be applied in water works industries. I was akin of knowing this when my client is NRW department of A Malaysian company, Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor Berhad (SYABAS). I was a bit ashamed when I found out that I don’t really know what is NRW means. That means, I don’t know my client. LOL.

Non revenue water (NRW) is water that has been produced and is “lost” before it reaches the customer. Losses can be real losses (through leaks, sometimes also referred to as physical losses) or apparent losses (for example through theft or metering inaccuracies). High levels of NRW are detrimental to the financial viability of water utilities, as well to the quality of water itself. NRW is typically measured as the volume of water “lost” as a share of net water produced. However, it is sometimes also expressed as the volume of water “lost” per km of water distribution network per day.
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