Hello and welcome to theFirst4it blog. The blog is here to provide a small insight into day to day life here at First4it, technical tip bits and general drivel.
This week we have had the opportunity to work with the Yorkshire Agricultural Society on their major expansion work http://www.fodderweb.com. This new building offers a café – with free WiFi for customers, farm shop and office space. The new building is designed to be green with ground source heating and cooling – all a bit grand designs really but the exciting bit is the BMS (Building Management System). This is a set of computers which collect data from sensors around the building and manage its energy consumption by for example opening the windows when its hot etc.. The BMS logs all its data back to a web server which sends out emails and soon text messages to alert people to changes i.e. the building’s on fire! or less excitingly the fridges have stopped working.
We have been allowing it to communicate with the rest of the world via the extensive fibre network at the YAS site. The fibre network also allows the extensive CCTV network of IP cameras to be viewed anywhere on site. This aint no ordinary fibre network – a mixtuire of single and multimode fibre forms a mesh across the show ground with spanning tree enabled, allowing the network to compensate if any of the links become damaged. For those parts of the site not lucky enough to have fibre available there are a mixture of 2.4 and 5 Ghz wireless links keeping even the cow shed online so their wireless pda’s can pick up their email and milk .com rss feeds.
That’s enough excitement for today!
