In rural Nebraska, drinking water generally comes from small wells and small municipalities struggle with limited resources to keep up, requiring them to look to outside contractors for help. “We primarily deal with smaller municipalities, so they don’t have as many operators on the payroll,” said Amos Burkey of Municipal Automation and Control. “A lot of the projects are wanting to have remote access for their operators.”

Municipal Automation and Control has been one of the companies testing out Horner’s new WebMI as a solution for remote monitoring and control of the Horner OCS line of products. The company was established in 2002 and specializes in controls for water and wastewater throughout Nebraska and Kansas. Burkey said Municipal Automation and Control has used Horner products for about 10 years and is testing WebMI on a job that involves drinking water wells. WebMI brings the functionality of the onsite Horner OCS directly to a PC or mobile device and works by using the microSD card in the OCS as the web server. In other words, the web site files and graphics are converted to SVG files and then transferred to the microSD card as HTML5 code. And all of this is done from within the Horner Cscape software.

With WebMI right on the master controller, it’s much more efficient. Graphics objects on the user screens can also be configured to have an associated access level. This level will determine which users can interact with this screen object, based on their own access level. For example, if a touch button is configured to have a user access level of 4, only OCS users that have logged in as a user with access level 4 or higher can select this button object. Burkey said some operators may only have the ability to monitor controllers in the field, but not make changes, a second tier has the ability to start and stop some processes, and a supervisor level has full control.