SCADA element solutions using Ethernet and mobile phone network

SCADA systems are gaining more popularity, including controlled environment applications. A particularity for these processes is that the distributed controlled environment is scattered in different locations. SCADA human machine interfaces (HMI) are accessed remotely, thus the human observers should not be restrained near the process physical location. One of SCADA application domain is E-Agriculture, where one the field with the main growth is greenhouse automation nowadays. This paper proposes, as initial stage, a viable solution for SCADA telematics system for distributed applications including greenhouse environment control. The key point for this project is to develop a generic telematics system that is integrated in SCADA applications. This system contains the following elements: PIC18F4620 microcontroller, GSM modem, Ethernet controller, RTC board, digital thermometer and a LCD. The main I/O features are: remote command for 5 digital output lines, remote monitoring for 4 input lines and a remote monitoring for a digital thermometer. The remote commands and monitoring are accomplished by using two solutions: 1) GSM/3G Short Message Service (SMS) / phone calling or 2) the web page hosted by the PIC microcontroller. Using this hybrid communication media, GSM and Ethernet, the proposed telematics system gains the flexibility of web access and the high coverage of GSM networks in a fault-tolerance system. The proposed solution was implemented and experimental tested with satisfactory results.