Lyttonnet, and many others ISP’s and WISP’s have chosen to use our Flexs Q4 to monitor and control their remote sites.

 

Lyttonnet operates a wireless and fiber optic internet distribution network that spans approximately 150 km’s of the Fraser valley in western Canada, one of it’s biggest challenges is the operation and maintenance of  more than 9 remote off grid repeater sites that span the area.

Uses include

• Monitoring of repeater battery voltages and temperatures.
• Monitoring wind turbine speed and output, activating brake during overspeed conditions
• Monitoring solar production and load wattage
• Remotely power cycling radios and other hardware devices.
• Remotely starting generator, monitoring output voltage and fuel levels, turning fuel on and off and disconnecting charger for generator warmup, choke control.
• AC Power Monitoring including presence, RMS Voltage, Current, Watts and Power Factor!

 

Here’s just a few reasons why customers choose to use the Flexs Q4.

 

Reliability: 

The Q4 is specifically designed for operation in the most rugged environments!
The IEC 60730 Safety Rated CPU powering the Flexs Q4 runs at 3.3V ensuring maximum immunity from harsh EMI and ESD interference, an external watchdog timer will also reset the unit after a brown out or other power failure causing improper CPU operation.
The Flexs Q4 also features a 100% solid state design with no electrolytic capacitors ensuring decades of reliable operation under harsh environmental conditions.

Low Power:

The Flexs Q4 has an active power consumption that is less than 1 watt ensuring that it will not drain your batteries or put unnecessary load on your power system.

 

Ease of Use:

Setting up a Flexs Q4 is as simple as plugging in a network cable and power jack. The devices IP address is shown on the OLED display and you can simply enter it into your web browser and start viewing the analog input voltages or manipulating the relay states. No software is needed except a web browser which means you can use the device on your smartphone, Mac or Linux computers!

Open Standards:

The Flexs Q4 is designed to easily fit into your existing monitoring or logging software without any special drivers or software. Open protocols like SNMP, JSON, HTTP and UDP are all supported.
And for those who don’t want to setup their own system, we also offer our own cloud based monitoring and control environment which is based on open source software (Influxdb and Grafana) allowing you to eventually migrate to your own server.

Standalone usage is also available through the Flexs Q4’s onboard webserver but an SD card must be installed for historical data logging.

Universal Inputs:

Each of the Flexs Q4’s analog inputs can read

• Voltage (up to 60V), Examples: Battery Voltage, Individual Cell Voltages / Balance, Wind Turbine AC Voltage Output, AC Line Voltage
• DC Current Sensors or Fuel Level Sensors (0-5V, 0-10V, 4-20MA)
• AC Current Sensors (CT’s) .333v or milliamp output (up to 50ma)

The inputs on the Flexs Q4 can also be configured to sense intrusion circuits, pulses, pulses per second,ac frequencies and more allowing you to monitor and log anemometers, wind turbine speed (On 3 phase ac output type generators)
When working with AC signals the Flexs Q4 can calculate RMS Voltage, Current, Watts, Frequency etc.

Each of the onboard voltmeters on the Flexs Q4 are measured at up to 16 Thousand Samples Per Second allowing you to directly monitor AC voltages and frequencies without any external conversion modules.

Analog Inputs are converted at 24 bit resolution or <0.000001V percision when sensing on a +/- 60V scale

Onboard Logic

Rules to turn off outputs based on input values are easily setup through the devices intuitive onboard webserver.

Examples:

• Automatically turn a generator’s starter off after it’s output voltage or frequency exceeds a threshold
• Activate a ballast load when battery voltage exceeds a set level
• Automatically reboot a device when x number of pings are dropped
• Short the output of a wind turbine when it’s frequency exceeds a threshold
• Turn a relay on based on date or time