HARDWARIO Non-Invasive Monitoring - Rotation Monitor

Make your machine a lot smarter and efficient with this device. Monitor rotations on the engine or any other part of the machine with just a little kit and a magnet.

It is non-invasive so you can deploy it almost anywhere in a short amount of time.

Visit other industrial projects with HARDWARIO IoT Kit on the projects page.

1. Build hardware

You will need the LCD Thermostat Kit and Sensor Module. It can run on batteries for around 2 years so you should be fine with 2 AAA batteries.

You can watch how to put together the Thermostat Kit down below, you will just plug the Sensor Module between the Core Module and LCD Module.

The last thing you will have to do is the encoder, you will have to do some soldering but you can look at the image to see how to do it.

!!!The red wire is connected to the 3V3 and 5V pin on the board!!!

2. Flash firmware

• Download HARDWARIO Playground,
• Flash firmware to the Core Module that was made for this project. You will find in the Playground by name: bcf-radio-lcd-as504x-absolute-encoder
• How to flash firmware is shown in the documentation.

3. Pair the Core Module

You need to pair the Core module with the Radio dongle that you are using, follow the instructions below to see how it is done.

• Connect your USB Radio Dongle to your computer.
• Open HARDWARIO Playground

• Click Start Pairing the LED on the dongle should start blinking
• Connect the device that you want to pair into your computer or insert the batteries.
• Wait for the device to appear in the table
• It should add the device with the Alias: magnetic-encoder:0

After you did all this you can unplug the device from the computer and plug in the USB to the socket. The next steps will be done on the computer, so you can leave the device and focus on the NODE-Red.

4. Import flow

Open Node-RED in the Playground or Raspberry Pi and import this flow from the Attachments in the Menu -> Import -> Clipboard.

Do not forget to hit "Deploy" in the top right corner to apply the changes.

This flow shows the data from the encoder on the gauge and even a graph, so you can see what happens at the machine right now and what happened like an hour ago.

5. Test your device

You need to place the magnet from the kit on some axle or something that you want the rotation to be meassure at, Onto that magnet you will put the rest of the kit and you are ready to get the data.

Summary

You can get a lot of information just from the rotation of your engines or machine. You can measure how fast it spins. If the engine is stuck, if the machine is operational, etc.

You can make some adjustments to the code so it suits your needs and your machine needs.

Feel free to ask any questions about this project.

• Visit HARDWARIO page on hackster.io for more interesting projects or go directly to their website
• Go to HARDWARIO documentation to learn more about their modules and other possibilities of the platform.
• Try more firmware from HARDWARIO Playground or write your own, it is easy to start.
• Because everything is Open source you can get all firmware on GitHub, get some inspiration and try to make your own applications.
• Get your own HARDWARIO Hub to replace your computer in this project so you have always access to your applications.
• Check out more applications that can be used with HARDWARIO IoT Kit in Integrations section.