Title: FlowSense Pro -

Title: FlowSense Pro - Industrial Flow & Chemical Dosing SCADA Gateway with OPC-UA & BLE

Problem:

Municipal wastewater treatment plants, breweries, and chemical processing facilities rely on analog 4–20 mA pressure/flow transmitters and mechanical pulse flow meters that lack native network connectivity. Modernizing these field instruments into SCADA platforms historically required dedicated automation racks and programmable logic controllers, inflating per-station deployment costs. Additionally, field technicians in wet, hazardous environments struggle with device commissioning and routine calibration because older systems require physical laptops, terminal blocks, and USB-to-serial cables. Traditional field gateways also lack secure, fail-safe remote firmware updates (OTA), risking operational downtime during software maintenance.

Solution:

Built a ruggedized, DIN-rail mounted smart gateway around the ESP32-S3 (Xtensa dual-core 240MHz) utilizing ESP-IDF v5.x:

High-Precision Dual Measurement: Combines a 16-bit ADS1115 ADC and a 0.1% precision 100 Ω shunt to read 4–20 mA current loops with ±0.5% calibrated accuracy, alongside a hardware pulse counter (PCNT) interrupt engine reading turbine flow meters up to 500 L/min.

Direct SCADA & OPC-UA Integration: Compiles the open-source open62541 OPC-UA stack directly into ESP-IDF, enabling the gateway to communicate natively with SCADA servers and industrial HMIs over TCP/IP without intermediate PLC hardware.

Cable-Free BLE Commissioning: Implements a custom BLE 5.0 GATT profile that allows field operators to calibrate sensor K-factors, set alarm thresholds, and configure local Wi-Fi credentials via an iOS/Android mobile companion app in seconds.

Zero-Power Display & Fail-Safe Actuation: Integrates an ultra-low-power 2.9" SPI E-Paper display that maintains critical process readouts even during brownouts, alongside four opto-isolated 24V/3.5A power MOSFET outputs driving dosing pumps and emergency shutoff valves in <10 ms.

Enterprise Security & Robust OTA: Employs mutual-TLS (mTLS) certificate-based authentication with AWS IoT Core and dual-partition HTTPS OTA with automated bootloader rollback upon boot failure.