This thesis presents a thorough upgrade of the existing PeFi system for the remote monitoring of household appliances at Gorenje d.o.o. The
existing system stored telemetry data in plain text files, the communication
between the ESP32 acquisition device and the server was unprotected, and
access to the appliances was limited to the company network. On this basis,
the upgraded PeFi2 system was designed and developed. It provides secure communication over the TLS protocol with digital certificates, it stores
telemetry data in a PostgreSQL database extended with TimescaleDB, and
it offers a redesigned, faster web dashboard with improved visualisation and
navigation. Alongside the server software, a key part of the thesis was the
new software for the ESP32 acquisition device. It is built on parallel tasks
running on the FreeRTOS operating system, it assembles the data captured
from the monitored circuit over the UART interface into packets and sends
them to the server over a secured connection, and at the same time it supervises the network connection, time synchronisation and memory usage.
A plug-in model was also introduced into the server software, allowing the
system to be extended to new projects with little effort. The PeFi2 system
was tested from several perspectives (data processing speed, server load) and
with a simulation of up to 200 concurrent ESP32 acquisition devices, during
which the server showed no critical load. The result is a working solution that is in regular use at the company and serves as a basis for further development of the system. Four project managers have so far shown interest in
this way of monitoring appliances, but the migration from their own systems
to PeFi2 is a long process and still in its early stages.
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