You've probably heard about the continuing drought in California.

The U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln currently categorizes more than 94% of the state's total area as in "severe drought" or worse, and notes that snowpack statewide (from which we get most of our water through the year) is at only 5% of normal.

The worst-hit area is the center of the state, especially the Central Valley that produces many of the vegetables, fruits, and nuts that appear on dining tables throughout the U.S.—and the world.

If you're near Mobile, Alabama, or the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, join us next week for the 3rd annual Allied Electronics Mobile Technology Day.

You'll see some 25 Allied suppliers at the Expo demonstrating the latest tech products and ready to answer your questions.

Be sure to look for Opto 22's Dan White. Dan will be there to show you how easy it is to build your own mobile app to monitor and control Modbus/TCP devices, OPC UA systems and equipment, and of course Opto 22 SNAP PAC controllers. 

Say you've got a dry contact switch you want to monitor so you know when it's closed. Could be a level sensor or pressure indicator, a magnetic reed switch or snap-action micro switch, or maybe a relay contact.

There are lots of ways you could do that, but often the best way is to use a SNAP-IDC5-SW digital input module. Why?

• It supplies 15 volts of power to an external dry contact switch.
• You only need 2 wires to connect the switch to the module.
• You can monitor 4 switches from 1 module.

Ben Orchard raves about this module in his recent blog post on monitoring water usage, and with good reason: it makes life easier by saving wiring time and complexity.

Visualizing water usage with groov:

As an Australian living in southern California I have been conflicted lots of times driving around seeing green lawns in baking hot sun.

When we moved to California from Australia in 2008, one of the worst droughts in history was still very much a huge issue for Victoria, the state we lived in. So when we arrived, the seemingly endless sea of green really, really surprised us all.

Australians have had little choice but to let their lawns brown off (often totally die) in the summer for many, many years...... It's just a fact of life of living in a sunburnt country.

As soon as we were able to buy our own home, I knew that monitoring our water usage was up near the top of my to-do list.

The challenge was how to share the data with the family, my wife and two teenage kids.

A typical day:

A typical day started arround 6 a.m. Getting up and getting into the mess to grab some breakfast and coffee, lots and lots of coffee.

Incidently, the food on the ship was fantastic. We had a young European cook who listened to one of my favorite DJs, Armin Van Buuran, while he was cooking... very cool.

Every morning at the factory and in the bridge on the ship, we had a team meeting at 7 a.m., usually around half an hour in duration. We each reported on the status of the system(s) we were managing. Mostly we were reporting if we were "go for launch," and if not, why not, was any other system holding our system up and how long would it take to get it ready.

You'll get three great new features (and more) in our latest PAC Project release:

• Use either a hostname or an IP address to identify your control engine (you'll really appreciate this feature if you have multiple controllers)
• Upgrade legacy systems by replacing the SNAP processor on a B-series mounting rack with the new SNAP-PAC-R1-B.
• Change the unit type on an I/O unit, for example if you replace a SNAP PAC brain with a rack-mounted controller, or an Ultimate I/O brain with a SNAP-PAC-R1-B.

Every application is different. But some things are similar:

• You have to monitor and control equipment.
• You don't have enough time in your workday.
• Your budget is seldom enough for what you have to do.

Watch the video and see how groov can help you save time and money in facility management. A groov mobile interface lets you keep moving while you monitor systems and equipment. 

Join us for the CSIA Executive Conference, April 29 through May 3 in Washington, D.C.

At this annual conference you'll get practical workshops on every aspect of a system integrator's business.

Plus you can network with other integrators and explore at the Expo, where over 60 industry suppliers, manufacturers, and service providers will demonstrate the latest in automation.

And the answer is: YES

I know it sounds like an April Fool's joke, but it's really true: you can build a groov mobile interface for your older Optomux system.

So you can monitor and control it from your smartphone or tablet. 

It works in spite of the fact that Optomux has been around since 1982, while groov is all about today.

After 7 years of planning and 3-4 months of frantic building, moving the submersible from the factory to the ship was a big deal.

We are engineers; we could have each spent another 6 months working on our parts of the system, but Jim was on a schedule and perfection would just have to take a back seat to safe and functional.

So there we were. In the wee hours of the morning, in a light rain, watching the crane very carefully lift our sub Deepsea Challenger onto the back of a flatbed truck.