The World Runs On Telemetry
The World Runs On Telemetry
"Telemetry" is a word you don't often hear slung around. It's also one of those words you hear thrown around by high-tech types, that makes novices put up a defensive palm and back away - "Sorry, I don't speak computerese!" So what is it, and why might it be the most important word we will learn in the 21st century?
"Telemetry" is any technology used for reporting information from a remote location. In a way of speaking, you're doing it right now! When you visited this web page, your web browser sent an HTTP request through the Internet to our server, and our server answered with the data for this page. Although you're doing it to read this page, not just to check and make sure our server's working (but thanks for the thought anyway!).
We use telemetry to find out all sorts of things going on in the world. Weather equipment is one sort of telemetry - we can hook thermometers, wind gauges, rain gauges, and humidity sensors up to wires, connect those wires to a server, and the server can broadcast the current conditions anywhere from there. If you have a weather applet on your screen anywhere, that's another application of telemetry. Burglar and fire alarms are another kind of telemetry.
The progress we've made on the digital sphere in the past twenty years has rapidly advanced the places where we can apply telemetric systems. Just a few of those uses are:
* Agriculture - monitoring a crop's moisture, and perhaps turning on a sprinkler if it gets too dry.
* Water management - everything from salinity to PH balance to reading your meter once a month.
* Defense - A big one, telemetric systems are in use to remotely monitor borders and battlefields.
* Vehicles - Whether a simple tracker to find the position of your delivery van, or sensors to tell the temperature of a Formula one racecar's tires or even a gauge to measure how much ice has formed on a satellite, telemetry in vehicles has hundreds of applications.
* Medicine - also known as "outpatient monitoring."
* Wildlife research - why they capture seals, fasten a tracking device on them, and turn them loose again.
* Retail businesses - theft and loss prevention are obvious uses, but recently vending machine companies have begun putting their dispensers "online" - the machine can send an order to a passing route trucks to tell it that it's out of product.
* Law enforcement - we've mentioned a couple of other applications. But those "ankle bracelets" used for house arrest are a form of remote monitoring as well.
Filed Under: Industrial Technology
