At our next SBE Chapter 85 meeting, Donald Ohse, Assistant Chief Engineer at KFOR-TV, will present a look at a custom generator monitoring and control system developed in-house for the station.
KFOR’s 600 kW standby generator was installed before today’s Internet of Things devices, cloud dashboards, and network-connected monitoring systems became commonplace. While the generator itself remained perfectly capable of doing its job, station engineers had very little remote visibility into its condition or operation.
The presentation will look at how existing equipment was brought into the connected era using Modbus, an industrial serial-to-Ethernet gateway, Linux, Python, MariaDB, and a web-based dashboard. The finished system now provides live generator monitoring, automatic alerts, historical logging, remote start and stop capabilities, and transfer-switch control from a web browser.
Donald will discuss both the generator and the engineering behind the project, including how older industrial equipment can often provide far more information and control than expected once you figure out how to communicate with it.
We’ll also look at some of the challenges of safely controlling a 600 kW generator remotely, what the monitoring system has already caught in real-world operation, and how the same approach can be applied to other legacy broadcast equipment.
If you work with transmitters, generators, HVAC systems, remote sites, or other equipment that predates the modern connected world, this should be an interesting discussion about giving old equipment some very new capabilities.