Why OGLAS — Off-Grid, No Telco, Your Data

• 1: Your data is your data
• 2: No telco dependency
• 3: Monitoring and alerts
• 4: Off-grid power

1 - Your data is your data

The single biggest design decision in OGLAS is that your data never has to leave your site. The hub logs every sensor reading to local storage, and Local keeps the full record on your hardware. There is no OGLAS cloud account, no monthly fee, no “premium tier” that holds the last 90 days of your history hostage.

What this means in practice

• No subscription. Buy the hardware, run it, done. There’s nothing to renew.
• No vendor lock-in. Readings are stored in plain text and easily-parsed binary formats. If you want to move them to a different system in five years, you can. If we disappear in five years, you still have everything.
• No third-party account. No login, no email-and-password to forget, no app store dependency.
• No telemetry. The hub doesn’t phone home. Updates are pulled when you choose, not pushed at 3am.

What we mean by “local”

The hub writes to its own flash, an SD card, or a host you connect (USB, network share, NAS — your choice), and Local runs on your own SBC or laptop. If you want an off-site copy or a remote view, that’s the optional Cloud half — on your own server, your own terms. The decision of where the data goes is always yours.

What it costs

Hardware. That’s it. There’s no recurring revenue model behind OGLAS — what you pay for is the boards, the enclosures, and the time to install them. Everything after that is yours.

The trade-off, honestly

You are responsible for your own backups. Local handles this for you on site, and Cloud can keep a second copy off-site — but the responsibility, like the data, stays yours. That’s the deal: total control comes with total responsibility for the data.

2 - No telco dependency

A lot of “smart” sensors assume your gate, your tank, and your shed all have decent 4G coverage. Most off-grid sites don’t. OGLAS doesn’t need them to.

How sensors talk

Every OGLAS sensor talks to the hub over long-range wireless — the same class of low-power radio used for everything from livestock trackers to satellite uplinks. Range is measured in kilometres, not metres. Power draw is low enough to run for a season on a single battery.

Some of the closer-in sensors also use a shorter-range, lower-overhead path. If a sensor is twenty metres from the hub, this saves airtime for the ones that need the full range.

Neither path involves a telco. Neither path involves the internet. Neither path charges per message.

What about the hub?

The hub also doesn’t need a telco connection to do its job. It logs locally and feeds Local analysis on its own display or whatever device you’ve pointed at it on your local network.

If you want to push data off-site — to a remote dashboard, a backup, a phone notification — you can absolutely do that, via the optional Cloud half over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LTE, satellite, or HaLow. The point is that’s optional, on your terms, and only happens when you set it up — not as a precondition for anything working.

Why this matters

• Internet outages don’t break monitoring.
• You can install OGLAS in places with no mobile coverage and no fixed-line option.
• No SIM cards to manage, top up, or replace.
• No “this product is end-of-life” letter from a 4G modem vendor turns your hardware into a brick.

3 - Monitoring and alerts

Sensors are only useful if someone notices the readings. OGLAS does both halves: a live picture of what’s happening right now, and an audible nudge when something needs your attention.

Real-time monitoring

The hub confirms every sensor message as it comes in, so you can see at a glance which sensors are healthy and which ones haven’t checked in.

• Large display — a wall-mount dashboard that pages through every sensor on your network.
• Small display — a desktop unit showing your two most important sensors at a glance.
• Local dashboard — if you’d rather use a phone or laptop, Local exposes a full web UI on your own network.

All three read from the same on-device log. Nothing leaves your site.

Alerts you’ll actually hear

The OGLAS bell is the sharp end of the alert system. It rings when:

• A gate opens — the bell pattern-matches gate activity and rings immediately. Rate-limited, so a flaky link can’t replay the same event into a buzz-storm.
• A direct command is sent — a ring or alarm instruction from the hub, a script, or another OGLAS device.
• A threshold is crossed — tank low, battery flat, or any other rule you’ve configured on the hub.

A single command can ring every bell on site at once, so the homestead bell and the shed bell go off together.

Missed-checkin

The hub tracks the last time it heard from each sensor. If a node goes silent — flat battery, dead radio, knocked off its mount — it gets flagged. No “everything’s fine” right up until the day it isn’t.

Off-site alerts (optional)

If you want a phone notification rather than just a buzzer in the kitchen, that’s a configuration on the hub plus the optional Cloud half — not a precondition. See No telco dependency for the philosophy: the system works without internet, and you choose what (if anything) to push beyond your site.

4 - Off-grid power

If your site runs on solar or batteries, every sensor’s power budget matters. OGLAS sensors are designed to spend most of their life asleep, and only the devices that need to listen continuously stay awake.

Battery sensors

The analog node and most “report a reading every minute” sensors:

• Run on a single LiPo cell (3.7 V, 1000–2000 mAh is plenty).
• Deep-sleep between samples — current draw drops to microamps.
• Wake, read, send, wait for confirmation, sleep — the whole cycle is under a second of activity per minute.
• Survive a full season on a charge for typical reporting intervals; longer with solar trickle.

We select hardware specifically for ultra-low deep-sleep current on battery-powered sensors. Slightly higher-power variants are available for always-on devices — pick the one that suits your install.

Always-on sensors

Some devices have to listen continuously — they need to catch incoming commands the moment they arrive:

• The gate is always listening for open commands.
• The bell is always listening for trigger messages.
• The hub is always listening, full stop.

These run from mains, USB, or a 12 V rail with a battery + solar buffer. A power-management sensor paired with a smart switch has the additional trick of using your solar surplus directly — running a load on stable extra watts so the system as a whole gets more useful work out of the same panels.

Power and monitoring loop closing on itself

Here’s the elegant bit: an OGLAS analog node reading its own battery voltage and reporting it to the hub closes the loop — you can see when a sensor is going flat before it goes silent, and replace the battery before you lose readings.