Deployed Project - RF Controlled Lights

Tolmer Falls lookout and boardwalk at Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory, Australia required a customised lighting control solution for the park rangers to control the pathway lighting via a manual switch in their rangers hut so the lights were only on for the national parks tour groups and not at other times which could scare off the natural wildlife that habitat these naturally dark areas.

Being a conservation area, trenching and hard wiring between the lights was not an option so solar lights were chosen and our team went to work in-house and designed a UHF repeater system including a new solar MPPT battery charger and lighting control module on printed circuit boards to broadcast switching signals from a master control unit out to the lights, with redundancy fallback making sure each light turned on.

Due to the lights having their own solar panel and battery pack, the  system had to be designed with energy efficiency in mind and for the control units to sleep through the day which we controlled by signals from the solar charge rates.

We also had to design a repeater system into several of the lights due to the path being 500m long through dense scrub and the UHF signal being limited by the amount of RF power we were able to broadcast in the specified UHF frequency.

This is just one of the high tech projects Tin Can Solutions has deployed with success.

Customer Router Connectivity Issues

Our client had installed multiple smart lockers throughout the new Logan City Council building which require mobile connectivity at all times. Unfortunately the cellular signal levels within the building were not adequate and caused continual nuisance drop-outs causing the system to fail intermittently. Luckily for our client, they picked up on this while commissioning the systems.

They were not allowed to connect their systems to the councils IT network due to government security policies and were not in favour of installing a separately cabled structured network so had to maintain a reliable cellular wireless connection.

Tin Can Solutions were called in to see what could be achieved and how to fix the issues.

With an initial on-site cellular survey we ascertained the areas that had cellular signal and areas that did not. The new building definitely has limited cellular signal throughout which is very common. The option of a Cellular In-Building Distributed Antenna System ( DAS ) was out of the question, and installing remotely cabled antennas were also not an option so we went for the next best option and changed over the existing high gain antennas to a lower gain RFI antenna and we also mounted the antennas exterior to the lockers to give the signal every chance possible.

The Sierra Wireless modems were also polling between bands and automatically connecting to higher frequency bands which limits signal penetration through dense obstacles such as walls. We assisted our client in programming the routers via AT commands to select lower frequency bands which helps the signal to penetrate walls, windows and obstructions. 

Our client has advised that there are no more continual drop-outs and the system has been reliably online since.