1) No more annoying low-battery beeping. When the smoke detector is connected to the SecurityProbe or BitSight via one of the (8) RJ-45 port, the main power source is the probe and not the 9v battery. Like a typical smoke detector, the Ravica smoke detector still takes a 9v, but it is a back-up and is only used in the case of a major power outage that takes the probe offline.

2) Ravica smoke detectors can be programmed to automatically make the emergency call for you. The smoke detector can be connected to dry contact inputs and be programmed to call 911 automatically when an alarm goes off. This cuts down on response time and can potentially save thousands of dollars in property damage.

3) View the situation from an easy-to-use web interface. With a Ravica SecurityProbe, you can view and control up to 4 cameras from the web. If a smoke detector alarm goes off, you can instantly see exactly what is causing the alarm and be better equipped to resolve the situation quickly.

If a web-based smoke detector sounds like a good addition to the fire/safety plan for your facility, check out the Ravica website or give us a call at 207.324.8173.

In the past, some of the SecurityProbe advantages included; advanced notification options, great video capabilities and the ability to connect up to 8 sensor probes per unit. The newest SecurityProbe retains all of these great features and adds four RJ-45 expansion ports to the front of the box which allows the connection of up to four expansion units. There are two expansion units options available: the E-opto16 and the E-sensor8.

With the E-opto16, you get 16 isolated dry contact inputs. A typical application for this expansion module would be to connect the dry contact to alarm panels and create custom alerts for each of the alarms. For example, one could have a dry contact connected to the fire alarm, another to the security alarm, and another to the AED cabinet. Each dry contact could then be set up to automatically call the respective emergency operator, in these cases the fire department, police, or paramedics. An unlimited number of E-opto16’s can be daisy-chained to accommodate up to 600 different dry contact inputs.

If you are more interested in increasing the number of intelligent sensors that can be monitored, there is the E-sensor8 that adds 8 sensor ports. Like the E-opto16, the E-sensor8 can be daisy-chained to allow the monitoring of up to 600 sensors through a single SecurityProbe. The two expansion units are also compatible with each other , giving the user complete control in designing the combination of dry contacts and sensors that works for their unique needs.

If you’d like more information on these new expansion modules, give us a call at 207.324.8173. We’d love to help you design an environmental monitoring system that does just what you need it to do.

Why do I care about SNMP?
I care about SNMP because I want to manage everything from a central location. We use MyView in Scrutinizer. From a central location, we can monitor the network, the call center and, if we wanted to, the coffee pot.

BTW: Fugoo is considering a marketing plan for their network connected coffee maker, however, it lacks support for SNMP and the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Come to find out, the best idea for coffee pot monitoring is a simple web camera.

SNMP Temperature Monitoring
We monitor temperature in our data rooms, call center, conference rooms and offices, and we do it all with our temperature sensors. We even put an airflow sensor in our HVAC air intake to monitor when the blower came on. I then polled for the SNMP information with Denika and produced historical trends with the data.

Summary
When we’re looking at hardware, equipment that supports SNMP generally makes it to our short list. All of our equipment supports SNMP.

- Mike

I have no idea what sort of back-up notification system for camera failure the TSA has set-up, but after reading about the Newark incident, I wanted to find out what kind of notifications are available for cameras connected to the Ravica SecurityProbe.  I played around with the demo interface that we have set up in our office and found that with the Notification Wizard there is an easy way to set up email (or voice or text. . .) notifications if one of the cameras connected to the SecurityProbe goes into a critical state, because it is broken or has been disconnected.  The following is a step-by-step procedure for making sure that a broken camera in your facility never goes unnoticed.

1.  Within the Ravica web-interface, click on the Notification tab and select “Begin Notification Wizard” from the menu on the right side of the screen.

2.  Select the notification type that you want to set-up.  Ravica supports almost any notification type that you could want from SNMP traps to sirens, emails to automated telephone messages.  In this example, we’ll set it up so that an email is sent to the security desk whenever the surveillance camera goes into a critical state.

3.  Enter the desired Action name, such as “Email Security Desk” and the email addresses of the individuals or groups that you would like notified when a problem arises.

4.  You can customize the email text that will be sent.  If you want, you can even attach a picture of the latest log or the current image on the selected camera.

5.  The next few pages go through the SNMP settings and resend intervals that you would like to set-up.

6. Link the camera to the email action.  Select the camera name in the Sensor column and make sure that “No Camera Signal Detector” is checked.

7.  On the final screen, there will be a list of all the sensor notifications that are set up for the SecurityProbe.  From this screen you can edit or delete an existing notification or create a new one.

That is all there is to it.  Now the security desk will get an email anytime the camera loses a signal and the problem can be resolved immediately.  Having a simple notification system, such as this, in place at the Newark Airport could have resolved the broken camera issue long before the breach occurred.  It probably wouldn’t  have helped out with the absent security guard, but that is a whole other issue. . .

If you are a wine aficionado or if you make your living in the wine industry, you know that temperature and humidity control is crucial to storing and aging wines.  The optimal temperature for storing wines is a constant 50° – 55°.  If it is too cold, the wine won’t mature and will taste flat and lifeless; too warm and the wine will cook and end up tasting off.

The optimal humidity for wine storage is 55%-85%.   Maintaining the proper humidity is important primarily for protecting the integrity of the cork and preventing oxidization.  The last thing you want is to do is turn that expensive bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon into a lousy bottle of vinegar.

If you have a wine cellar, or are thinking of building one, you are going to want to have a quality environmental monitoring system in place.  This is true whether the wine cellar is in your home, your restaurant, or at a commercial winery.  The Ravica line of SensorProbes, temperature and humidity sensors, and sensor controlled relays can help you monitor the conditions in your wine cellar, even if you are away from your home or business.  Ravica’s easily configured web-interface can be set up to automatically turn on  air conditioning units and humidifiers to maintain the optimum temperature and humidity levels for your wine collection.  You can also be notified if your equipment is not operating properly by setting up email or text alerts that are sent when the specified temperature and humidity thresholds are surpassed.

If you need help designing an environmental monitoring system that will meet your wine storage needs, give us a call.  We’d love to hear about your project and help you protect your inventory.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at Ravica!  And enjoy your glass of Beaujolais Nouveau this year, it is supposed to be a very good vintage.

At first, I gave her a demonstration of the BitSight2 for temperature and humidity monitoring. It has two sensor ports, so she could monitor inside and outside, then view the data via a web browser from inside her house.

Almost jokingly, I then showed her the SecurityProbe with camera capabilities and she loved the thought of being able to see the dogs. Also, with several sensor ports, she could add smoke, water and other sensors, if she discovers a need in the future. Mostly, the cameras were a huge hit. “I can see if they are all huddled up or walking around and being active,” she said.

It’s nice to sell outside of the data room temperature monitoring market.

- Mike

• Monitoring for water leaks
• Voltage monitoring for electrical brownouts or complete electrical loss
• Motion detection and automated photo delivery
• Airflow monitoring

The Ravica solutions include appliances which support all of the above intelligent sensors and include SNMP access to the data. A web interface to configure or review the data is also available.

And in case you are curious on where the expression “soup to nuts” originates from. I found this interesting.

- Mike

After spending hours visiting the hospital, surrounded on all sides by the constant noise of  beeping monitors,  I really began to appreciate the precision under which the modern hospital is run. It is a finely tuned machine and temperature monitoring is an extremely important part of the operation of that machine. In fact, one of the main reasons that the twins needed to stay in the hospital was that they hadn’t developed the ability to self-regulate their own body temperature. They needed to be in the temperature-controlled environment of the incubator. The entire room in which they were staying also needed to be kept at a precise temperature for the times when they were outside the incubator, bonding with their mother.

When you think about it, there really isn’t a location in a healthcare environment where temperature monitoring is not a major issue. From monitoring the temperature in a patient room for their comfort and safety to the temperature of the coolers that store medications and vaccines, temperature monitoring is  a life-or-death concern. The Ravica line of SensorProbes can help with the temperature monitoring needs of  any hospital or clinic.   Some specific locations where the sensor probes would be useful are:

• Patient Rooms
• Operating Rooms
• Blood and Tissue Banks
• Cold Rooms in Pharmacies
• Vaccine Storage
• Hospital Data Centers

The BitSight monitors and temperature sensors can be scaled to a single room or linked together for whole ward monitoring depending on the specific needs of the facility. Instant notification of a potential problem can be  sent to nursing staff and corrected before critical thresholds are passed. In the healthcare environment having a reliable environmental monitoring system in place is literally a life-saver.

~ Jessica

This company just added a new international sales department. The work hours for the new employee were going to be 4:00am to 1:00pm. They wanted to know if they could utilize the picture log to record when people go in and out of the front door. They also wanted to limit the time frame for these pictures.

I did a bit of research and found out the answer was yes! You can set a time frame on the camera motion sensor and you can have the picture emailed or stored on the FTP server.  Now, they would get an alert and a picture when someone came through the door.

At this point, they could figure out who came through the door. They then wanted to know if too many people were going through the door during the early morning hours. To do this, we used a Syslog/Eventlog application that allows you to set a threshold. Each time an image was taken with the camera, an alert would be sent to the Syslog/Eventlog manager. If a threshold was met, let say five, then an email would be sent to the security office.

The customer was excited and wanted to implement this in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to see how it comes out.

-Jimmy D

As I mentioned before, the “continuous time to report,” or “rearm” as it is called on the SecurityProbe, are an excellent way to say, “Don’t alert me as soon as a sensor goes into a ‘warning’ or ‘critical’ status. However, if it has been in a ‘warning’ state for 30 seconds, let me know.”

Another way to limit how often – or how easily – your BitSight2 or SecurityProbe sends you Skype alerts or emails is to adjust the “reading offset” field, which can be found under each sensor’s advanced settings. The “reading offset” forces the sensor’s reading to move over or under a certainly value before generating an alarm. So basically, if your temperature upper “warning” threshold is set to 80 degrees and your “reading offset” is set to 2, and the current temperature is 79 degrees, then your SensorProbe will not alarm until the temperature drops another degree.

This prohibits the sensor from being right on the verge of a threshold and consistently bouncing between two statuses. You don’t want 20 emails in your inbox because the temperature in your data center is exactly on your threshold and wobbling back forth between “normal” and “warning.”

Another way of limiting alerts during off hours, maintenance windows or times when you are not really concerned with the readings breaching a threshold is to use the calendar feature. Please note that the calendar feature is available only on the SecurityProbe line of SensorProbes.

Block off times that you do not wish to receive alerts and the SecurityProbe will ignore the breached thresholds during those time frames. Perhaps you don’t want to receive alerts during the day, because people are always present and aware of the environmental conditions in the locations you are monitoring. However, maybe you want the temperature of your walk-in cooler monitored at night, when no one is in the building.

Whatever the reason, these are two great tips for better managing your alarms. This ensures that your alarms are more meaningful and so when you or you staff see an alert from your BitSight2 or SecurityProbe, you know it is time to act.

~ Jon Mills
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