News & Events

 A customer recently came to us with the need of remote access to control panels over a large geography. This customer has thousands of PLC control panels over the state of California. This makes it financially limiting to put a device in every control panel to allow remote access, and the engineer is limited by travel time and cost to physically go to wherever a problem might be. However, the control engineer that needed access to all of these panels for troubleshooting has the geography divided into 25 districts, and each district has a technician that can easily get to hundreds of control panels.

The solution was to build remote access boxes and put one in each technician’s van. Then when remote access is needed, the technician will go to that site and plug in the remote access box to open up remote access for the engineer.

The best remote access solution was the Tosibox 650 series lock. This lock has a USB key that is in the possession of the engineer. When the remote box is powered up at the site, the Tosibox lock remains completely secure as the USB key is required for a connection. The engineer has a solid path into the site. The 650 lock was chosen as it has a cellular backup to the RJ45 connection. So if for some reason the Internet is down at the site, the lock can still be accessed through the cellular connection.

Together with the customer, we designed the Tosibox lock to be mounted in a Pelican case on Din rail with an Ethernet switch, an HMI that was programmed to be used for further onsite troubleshooting, and a long Ethernet cable to plug the box into the local switch at the control panel. The customer ordered all of the parts from us and built the boxes to the specifications. They are very happy with the result.