Technical

Technical Solutions

Tin Can Solutions offer bespoke solutions to our clients where projects require a customised approach to achieve an end result with reliability as the key factor.

 

Cellular LTE Modem Setup

Overview

Tin Can Solutions are more than just a shop front selling and installing some pretty cool gear.

We also back what we say with many years of knowledge and experience in some extremely technical and automated systems.

Background

Originating in high tech industrial and commercial electrical automation and process control systems, some of which are in remote areas requiring that they be online for control and monitoring purposes at anytime of the day or night, Tin Can Solutions are well versed at acquiring communications signals and maintaining connections for equipment and users alike. 

Our director has been involved with high speed industrial automation since his electrical apprenticeship in 1992, and since then he has been involved in making applications communicate with each other involving internal programming of mobile LTE routers with high level programming languages such as Python, Hayes AT Commands, MQTT and web based scripting languages such as PHP, Javascript and more.

Making equipment communicate with each other involves many forms of converting data signals between devices and communicating the data and control signals over cellular LTE carriers such as Telstra, Optus and Vodafone dependent on the customers carrier preferences and the availability of the carriers signals in the area.

With this extensive background in communications systems, we have learnt a lot over the many years in the industry and most importantly, what works and what doesn't.

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.

Service

We offer our technical services and knowledge as a service to our customers and also contractors and business' within the field that require some assistance with router configuration setup and also how to get good signal strengths for reliable communications through the correct antenna and equipment selection.

Need to know more!

Get in touch with our tech team to see how we can be of assistance.

CONTACT US

We're here to help!

 

If you've got any queries, call us on +61 7 3180 3840, or flick us a message below.

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