I thought I would share a recent little side-project that I did, putting together a neat and tidy solution to take wind measurements over a three month period for a customer who is interested in installing small wind turbines at some of their rural radio repeater sites.

We built two almost-identical boxes for the customer, using a MangoES to log data from a Davis Instruments "Vantage Pro 2" weather station. All the equipment in the box is powered by an external DC supply (one site has 48VDC, one has 12VDC) provided by the customer.

The MangoES logs and records data from the weather station at a 30s interval. The data is then pushed to our Mango server using the Persistent TCP Mango module and a 3G VPN router (the bare PCB in the images below) provides connectivity via a Yagi antenna high on a mast.

An 'Ocean Controls' modbus gateway is used to connect the MangoES unit to the weather station using the built-in RS485 interface.
The MangoES is then connected, using ethernet, to our 3G router - which not only allows it to transmit data, but also allows us to log in (via our VPN) and check up on the units or make adjustments anytime.

The metal brackets are for mounting the weather station console/keypad on (which is actually required, unfortunately, to take measurements via RS485):

The data that we are getting from the units is very detailed. In total the MangoES is recording about 30 weather measurements, and we are even able to measure the DC supply voltage (as recorded by our 3G router) via the Mango SNMP module.

After the units were installed, I also set up Mango to send a weekly summary report to myself and the customer via email. The report shows the last week's worth of weather data on a chart and includes CSV files. It includes some average, mix and max values too. The email report is particularly convenient as it means the customer automatically receives the data and doesn't have to request it.

Interesting question. I would also like to find a good solution.

At the moment I am using statuscake.com to monitor the external availability of my mango server, though it will really only verify that the web-server is running.

I also use LibreNMS to chart my server stats - memory, disk, CPU, and have been meaning to set up alerts for these.

Perhaps something like a randomly changing watchdog value - which is posted to a remote server using the HTTP Publisher module, then a PHP or python listener script on the remote server alerts you if the value doesn't change in a while.

Or, set up a separate Mango server (on a VPS or something, which should be only a few dollars a month) and use the Persistent TCP publisher and listener modules to send a random number etc. across. You could make the generation of the random number quite complicated (using virtual data sources, meta points, point links, etc.) so that if any sub-system of mango breaks it will stop the value changing. On your remote mango server you could just set up a 'no change' alarm to email you.

Well done Joel, new forum looks and feels great. It's also really fast!

Hi Adaf/Asaf

There are some snippets from another user in this thread that might help:
http://infiniteautomation.com/forum/topic/1969/modbus4j-modbus-rtu-master/8

@hanse1pk said:

Managed to get it working.
Had to use 4 byte float swapped

Next item is for me to take in these integers such as in second example and have them be shown and recorded as what they represent.

This doc might be useful to you: http://wiki.infiniteautomation.com/doku.php?id=tipsandtricks:bestpractice

In my experience (having added probably a dozen different types of device to Mango using Modbus) there is always a bit of fluffing around initially to discover the magic transformation to get from the manufacturer's address to the address that Mango expects.

The first thing I usually do is look in the documentation for the modbus registers and find a register that can be easily identified - usually something like a 'hardware model number' or other known value.

Then you can use the 'Modbus Read Data' and 'Point Locator Test' functions on the Data Source page to test out different registers to try to hit the value you want.

In an extreme example, the manufacturer's documentation may say that a holding register is located at 43004, but you might find that the actual register you need to input into Mango is 3003 (43004 - 40001). Software such as 'Modbus poll' or 'CAS Modbus Scanner' also helps in figuring this out.

Looks great - can't wait to try!

Hi Mircea,

Is this for a MangoES? If so, the following link may help: https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkConfiguration#Setting_the_speed_and_duplex

As noted in that link, do be careful (particularly if this device is remote!) that you do not inadvertently lock yourself out of the device. Unstable link speeds can often be symptomatic of bad cabling, faulty termination, or intermittent noise and identifying and addressing the root cause may be called for.

One other thing to note is that many switches and other bits of network gear allow you to set a 'manual' speed by effectively disabling some rates, eg. you could disable Gigabit on the switch port and auto-negotiation would max out at 100Base-TX.