Watching up to 500 welding machines spread across a site, all from a single screen. KAITECH built a lightweight OEE monitoring solution built around LoRa communication.
■ The Challenge
This customer manufactures welding machines and needed a way to track every machine’s operating status across its site in real time, with regularly updated reports. With machines spread across a large area, the company needed a communication method that could cover that range without the cost of extensive wiring.
■ Our Approach
KAITECH proposed and built an OEE solution that aggregates sensor data from each welding machine, connected over RS-485, up through LoRa devices and gateways to a cloud server. Machines on-site connect to gateways via LAN/WiFi or LoRa, which then send data to the cloud server. Managers check productivity data from a PC browser on a real-time basis. The architecture was designed to monitor up to around 500 machines at once.
■ Results & Highlights
- Brought real-time, centralized monitoring to up to around 500 welding machines across the site
- Used LoRa to cover a wide area without extensive wiring work
- Productivity reports update in real time, giving instant visibility into the whole site
- Removed the need to check machines individually, reducing the management workload
■ Why KAITECH Was The Right Fit
For a monitoring system meant to cover an entire site, the balance between communication reliability and cost determines success. KAITECH drew on its experience combining RS-485 and LoRa to deliver an architecture that scales to around 500 machines without large-scale wiring work.
■ Tech Stack
RS-485, LoRa, Flask, FastAPI, React, MySQL, MongoDB, InfluxDB, Grafana