Building Management System

BUILDING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - MARVAIR |

Challenge
Telecommunications shelters, especially wireless telecommunications, contain equipment that often generates a high heat load. Effectively and efficiently maintaining climate control inside the shelter is important not only to reliability and longevity of equipment, but also to reducing cost of operation.

Process/Approach
Prism partnered with industry leader Marvair to build a highly configurable and scalable climate control and monitoring system for wireless telecommunication shelters. We worked closely with industry experts at Marvair to learn the specific challenges and requirements of the project.

Leveraging our extensive embedded design experience, Prism was able to extrapolate the customer requirements to design a solution that would not only satisfy the customer’s specific needs, be would also be extensible to a more diverse set of applications and operating conditions.

Solution
The solution is a fully custom, modular, wall-mounted product that integrates numerous shelter monitoring and control systems and provides a configurable system for controlling and monitoring shelter climate.

Custom-printed circuit boards housed in a rugged, wall-mounted enclosure, are specifically designed to meet the unique demands of modern telecommunication environments. This solution hosts an independent Wi-Fi network, enabling technicians to access and control the system through laptops, portable electronic devices, or cell phones.

The system is powered by a low-cost, single-board computer in combination with multiple STM32 microcontrollers and runs application software that includes custom applications on Embedded Linux and bare-metal applications developed in C++. It supports multiple industry-standard communication protocols such as Modbus/TCP, SNMP, and BACnet, and offers wired Ethernet connectivity for seamless integration into customer networks.

Our solution also provides field updates for all software applications, allowing for functional customizations to meet evolving customer requirements. Multiple connectivity options for HVAC equipment can be utilized, including traditional hardwired interfaces and Ethernet. The shelter supports up to four analog temperature and humidity sensors for monitoring and controlling multiple zones, and it can manage up to four independent HVAC systems.

Results
The solution immediately provided the customer a competitive advantage, with Marvair offering their end customer a superior product, delivering an immediate reduction to the cost of shelter operation along with significantly expanded functionality.

As a result of the configurability and expandability of this solution, Prism was able to adapt the solution for effective use in a diverse range of equipment shelter types such as: