Hi

I have just started a project at Uni in which i will be developing a system to monitor a railway level crossing. I want to be able to store the information about lighting/barriers etc on a computer then send the info over a phone line to another computer. I dont really know where to start at the moment, i'm not asking for coding help or anything like that..... yet! i just want any general ideas about how it could be done?

Any help that someone could give me would be very much appreciated

Thanks again


John

Is there any reason why it couldn't be completely internet based (well your using a telephone anyway if its modem based ) Using some sort of OS coordinates you could map out all the info about the barriers etc with some sort of database (mySQL?) telling you if they were up(1) or down(2) and have some sort of cron job that would check all this every 5 minutes or so?

Hope it remotely helps.

Rob

It depends completely on
1) how you are getting the information. Are there sensors on the crossing gate, lights, etc?
2) How you are connected to the phone line. Direct or dial connection?

This will probably take quite a bit of hardware attached to the crossing for you to read and store. Your description is too vague for us to know what to tell you.

Hi Sorry i was a bit vague, i'm still trying to figure it all out myself too.

I'm going to try to simulate the level crossing with a microprocessor, (a much smaller scale level crossing obviously!) then i will have sensors on the relevant outputs (lights, barriers, track circuits etc). But from then on i dont honestly know yet. I need to be able to record the outputs in some sort of database of timings.

I was hoping this could be done with something like visual basic so that i can display the results on screen (or any other method of visualy seeing the results). There are set times that the barriers must move and lights flash so i want to be able to monitor that the times recorded are within a set threshold. At the end of a day i want to send the information down a phone line to a remote computer that can then see the results of the day.

Do you have any more ideas?

I think the main thing is recording the timings somehow and then being able to send them over a phone line to a remote computer. But i've not done this before so i dont really know how i can do this, especially the part when it comes to sending the information down a phone line.

Any help would be a great help

Thanks again