Brief

We were approached by a major civil engineering company that needed custom electronics to control current and voltage in a new Cathodic Protection system.

Implementation

We developed electronics hardware and firmware that interfaced to a central SCADA system over a 2 wire RS485 bus running Modbus. From the SCADA system the output currents could be controlled and the resulting voltages monitored. The micro-controller software (firmware) was developed in C. This design involved precision analogue electronics to supply and monitor precise currents.

In a later addition to the product we added support for a modem so that the device could be controlled and monitored from a central server on the Internet when the device was in a remote location i.e. where there was no central SCADA system.