Design of a dedicated remote terminal unit prototype

Many applications need to monitor and control situation in faraway places such as environmental, medical, industrial, and water resources. Telemetry and SCADA systems are used in these applications where telemetry system used for monitoring only while SCADA used for monitoring and control. The remote terminal unit (RTU) is the important part of these systems. This thesis introduces the design and implementation of a simplified economical and practical multi-purpose remote terminal unit, which can be integrated directly with analog and digital sensors. The cost of RTU was considered as an important factor because of the huge numbers of RTU units used in sensor networks for different applications. Environmental Telemetry System was taken as case study in this work in which environmental data were collected and transferred from the remote location to the final destination (the central unit) and saved for further analysis. The work comprises hardware and software efforts. In hardware, the component used in the design is a standard and low cost component such as PIC16F887 microcontroller which interfaced with analogue and digital temperature sensor to represent the data collection part of the RTU. In the
software, many algorithms has been designed and implemented to perform the managements, save and data display. Computer networks, USB and GSM were used as a communication channel between the RTU and the central unit. PIC16F887 microcontroller was interfaced with Ethernet controller to send the data over the computer networks as a telemetry system. Using PIC16F887 microcontroller and serial port give serial communication over USB cable as a SCADA system. These approaches are designed, implemented and tested successfully in this work.