Features

Remote Access

Remote Access with Blinky-Lite

Consider the image of control rooms with TV screens and dials. This concept of a control system is great for large facilities that have a 24/7 staff on site. But this way of operating is expensive and inefficient for most types of facilities. Facility malfunctions usually do not happen while sitting in a control room during business hours. Many times, malfunctions occur in the middle of the night when experts are far away from the site. Also the world is interconnected as it has never been before. So an engineer needs access to the control system out in the field; wherever and whenever that may be.

To bring the control system to the engineer, Blinky-Lite was designed from the ground up to be a remotely accessible control platform. Sensors and actuators can be located anywhere in the world. All user applications are web applications that can be used on a mobile phone, tablet, desktop computer, or even in a control room.

Full Stack

Built-in applications

Since the key feature of Blinky-Lite is remote access, security is the driving force in the development of Blinky-Lite. To be secure, a control platform must be complete or full-stack. Most available control platforms are just communication protocols. This leaves the user with missing functionality which often leads to a patchwork system, riddled with potential security vulnerabilities.

In contrast, Blinky-Lite strives to deliver a complete system. Not only does Blinky-Lite provide a set of device interfaces, a communication protocol, and configuration databases, it also provides

an alarm system, notification system, device viewers, and plotting packages. The data archiving system also includes access and setting history. User authentication interfaces include one-time-password, two factor authentication. And, instead of name-value pairs, device data is object-oriented which lends to complex data types, such as vectors and images. There is even an integrated logbook application, with hooks into the notification system.

Customization

Application Builder

Even though the base stack of Blinky-Lite applications should fit almost all of a user’s needs, custom user applications are an integral part of any control platform. However, developing event-driven control applications can be very challenging.

Blinky-Lite provides an application builder that makes it easy for the user to build their own custom dashboard application, without having to do any programming. The application builder has a basic library of widgets based on Boostrap 4 cards. The user just configures a JSON file in the Blinky-Lite app database.

Currently, the app builder has nine different types of cards and thirteen different types of widgets, which should cover almost all of the use cases a user will need. However, Blinky-Lite also has a framework for developing custom application cards that fit seamlessly into the Blinky-lite ecosystem.