Simultaneous Failure Of Multiple Electrons

Back up in Maine. Required a reboot.

my 2, a 2g & a 3g, are both online. i’m i tucson, az. i’m kinda curious, because it appears to go coast to coast, what happened if that can be released. i remember reading in one of the emails about the work to be performed that "All existing cellular and wi-fi devices will maintain connectivity without interruption."
and i thought to myself that it was probably worded wrong but i understand that most companies always reflect best case. in any event great news that things are getting back to normal.

Stormwater management! https://optirtc.com/. Happy to say that our failsafe logic, designed for this very case, performed as intended across the country during the connectivity outage.

Nice website and overview video!

Tell us what your failsafe logic you had setup is and how it responded to this widespread outage if you can share :slight_smile: I’m we could all benefit from hearing how it work in this real-world case.

Sure! In our case, we are handling a wide variety of stormwater infrastructure across many regions in the U.S. These can range from rainwater harvesting cisterns to detention ponds where we actively control valves to improve infrastructure outcomes (e.g. minimizing pollutant outputs, minimizing downstream soil erosion). Each type of infrastructure can have different “safe” behaviors during an outage, determined by a design engineer that understands the site’s goals and physical properties. Take for example a dry pond, whose goal may be to capture / filter runoff during and after storm. During dry weather, we want this infrastructure to be empty so that when the next storm comes, all of its volume can be available to capture incoming rain, and if possible, be held back from drainage to rain/sewer systems during peak rainfall to prevent flooding. Failsafe behavior may be simply opening the valve to 100%. If it rains during an Electron outage, the dry pond, without Opti installed on it, would have simply had an open outflow designed to slowly trickle water out. So the failsafe in this case is, just open it and have the system behave as it would have before our hardware/software controlled it. On the other hand, if we are controlling a large pond that is always full of water, we would not want to simply open the valve and drain the pond when an Electron loses connectivity. In this case, the failsafe behavior may be to fully close the valve and alert our customers at the site that the pond is not in automatic control mode. Many of our electrons are simply monitoring passive infrastructure such as green roofs, bioswales, etc, and not actually controlling the water flow through those systems. In that case, there is no failsafe behavior - we’re just missing data when Electrons go down. The failsafes are configurable based on site-specific needs.

This just touches on what Opti’s control behavior is during outages. Lots of much more interesting stuff happens during normal operation!

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