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Sensor Networking

Table of Contents

 

This document is broken into two sections:

  • End-customer networking information

  • information for IT departments / technical information

During the process of purchasing your sensor(s), your Account Manager provided a networking form for your IT department to review. This form helps Pollen Sense Support understand your networking requirements and ensure smooth onboarding.

For Customers

Some networking features must be pre-configured before shipment. Static IP for one. If we are notified after shipping then there could be an additional charge for setup. Let’s make life easy for our IT departments and do this preemptively.

Particle Sense

This documentation assumes that you have acquired an APS-400 sensor or newer. For older sensors, please get in contact with your Pollen Sense Account Manager to discuss your options.

The Particle Sense - Sensor Manager mobile app is the primary way to manage sensors. The app is available for both iOS and Android devices.

You should have received an account setup email as part of the purchasing process. Any sensors you purchase will be assigned to your account’s organization before shipment.

Networking features of the app include:

  • Viewing Ethernet connection status and MAC address

  • Viewing connected Wi-Fi Network Name, connection status, and IP address

  • Connecting to supported Wi-Fi networks

  • Viewing Network connection strength

Particle Sense requires Bluetooth and location permissions in order to connect to your sensor to view and configure networking.

Connecting to your Sensor via Bluetooth

After logging into your account, all sensors assigned to you will be listed. Select the desired sensor. A card with a blinking or solid green Bluetooth logo will be visible. After the sensor connects, networking information will be displayed.

For more information on setting up the sensor networking, please see the guide Connecting a Sensor to Wi-Fi .

Ethernet Setup

Generally, Ethernet setup should be plug-and-play, unless your IT department needs to do whitelisting of MAC addresses (viewable in Particle Sense app). The status of the network connection is viewable in Particle Sense.

Wi-Fi Setup

For technical and security reasons, APS sensors will only remember and connect to one SSID. If you use Particle Sense to setup a new Wi-Fi network on the APS sensor, the previous network will be forgotten.

After your mobile device connects to the sensor via Bluetooth, an button to “Connect To Wi-Fi” will be available. Selecting this will show a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks as well as their signal strength. If the sensor can connect to the network a password field will be shown. After approximately 30 seconds the Networking information will refresh and show connection success or failure.

Wi-Fi reliability

As Pollen Sense Sensors are generally run outdoors, Wi-Fi signal strength can be an issue. Most Wi-Fi networks are designed to cover the insides of buildings and coverage often does not extend outside or to the roof. As such, it is highly recommended to work with your IT department to setup some uptime monitoring that will check to make sure the device is visible on the network. Some IT departments may also be able to monitor signal strength from their networking dashboards. For more information, direct your IT department to the Uptime Monitoring section of this document.

IT / Technical Information

The following network configuration diagram covers the basics of networking requirements for APS-400 sensors:

Networking Form For Hubspot (page 2)

APS-400 Network Diagram

Key highlights:

  • The sensor cannot be connected to via the local network. All data generated by the sensor is accessible via our mobile and web platforms.

  • all connections between the sensor and the cloud are secured with SSL/TLS.

  • Default DNS servers are Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1 with fallback of Google’s 8.8.8.8

  • NTP server used are google’s time<Number>.google.com, most often time3.google.com.

  • Occasionally, a Pollen Sense Technician may need to diagnose or troubleshoot issues with the sensor alongside the customer. Connections into the sensor are performed through Tailscale, a mesh VPN solution protected by Access Control Lists. For more information, please contact us

Our customers have reported the greatest success of timely sensor installations done on non-restrictive or less-restrictive VLANs. Some have even elected to deploy sensors on a guest network and bypassing any captive portals or logins.

Networking configuration options are grouped into 3 categories:

  • stable (officially supported and battle-tested)

  • beta (some initial deployment success, may need to be configured before shipment)

  • unsupported

Pollen Sense APS sensors are Industrial IoT devices and should be treated differently than end-user computers or servers on your network. Using our stable configuration options listed below is highly recommended as it will reduce delays in deployment of the sensor.

A form will be provided to the customer near the end of the sales process to collect information on networking requirements. Completion of this form in its entirety will be required before any sensors ship out.

A Note on Beta Configuration Options

In the following sections, some configuration options may be listed as beta. this means:

  • initial testing has been performed

  • some customers have successfully deployed these options with help of Pollen Sense support (though some instances of unsuccessful deployments may exist)

  • not user configurable. This means that it will have to be configured before the sensor ships, possibly delaying shipment by up to 1-2 weeks (depending on complexity of request and receiving all relevant information).

  • cannot be changed once shipped (or additional fees may apply).

For most of these beta options, we are exploring ways to allow the end-user to configure these options, most likely through the Particle Sense companion app. Exceptions to this policy will be detailed in the option’s section.

MAC Addresses

MAC addresses are available to view inside the sensor companion app, Particle Sense. more information on the app can be found here.

MAC addresses will be provided after payment and before shipment of the sensor if you indicate the need for Static IPs or DHCP reservations in the networking form. more information on IP addresses in the next section.

IP Addresses

Currently, the only stable configuration option is IP addresses assigned dynamically via DHCP. It’s recommended to use a DHCP reservation instead of a static IP if a non-changing IP address is a requirement.

Static IP support is in beta, thus is not user configurable. It is strongly encouraged to use DHCP reservations instead, as Static IP addresses will have to be configured before shipment of the hardware and may delay shipment by 1-2 weeks depending on complexity of requirements. If a static IP address is an unavoidable requirement, MAC addresses and hostnames will be provided after payment has been received and a sensor(s) has been allotted. See the Beta Configuration Policy.

Because static IP’s are not end-user configurable, the sensor can only be deployed on the network it was pre-configured for.

DNS Servers

APS-400 sensors are configured by default to use Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 / 1.0.0.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS servers. They generally will not respect any DNS options set by a router.

Changing the DNS servers is currently in beta, and is not user configurable. Like Static IP addresses, this will have to be pre-configured before shipment of the sensor, thus delaying shipment by up to 1-2 weeks. See the Beta Configuration Policy.

Wi-Fi Networks

Supported Options

  • WPA2

  • Open networks, without a captive portal or bypassed with whitelisted MAC address

Supported Wi-Fi configuration options can be done using the Particle Sense companion app and are user-configurable. Only the most recent Wi-Fi Network will be remembered by the sensor.

Unsupported Options

  • WPA3

  • Open Networks with Captive Portals

  • WPA-Enterprise

Ethernet

Generally, any standard ethernet connection should function

NTP Servers

Sensors are pre-configured to use time3.google.com. Some features of the sensor require the time to be in-sync with our cloud servers. If a mismatch is detected, a request to sync time with time3.google.com is sent to match. As such, changing NTP servers is currently unsupported. We are actively looking for ways to remove this requirement and move support to beta level; we apologize for the inconvenience. If your IT policies strictly cannot allow the sensor to communicate with third-party NTP servers, please let us know the reasons why in the form provided to the customer by the Pollen Sense account manager.

Hostname

Changing the hostname on the sensor is unsupported and unlikely to change in the future as doing so would require significant development efforts. If this is a requirement for you, we welcome any feedback to gauge the need amongst our customers.

Cellular

Using a cellular modem is unsupported and unlikely to change in the near future. We’ve experienced too many problems running consumer cellular modems/hotspots, mostly due to weak cellular and Wi-Fi antennas. Most commercial IoT cellular modems and plans are designed for devices with lower bandwidth and data capacities than APS sensors require and we’ve yet to find an offering that is cost-effective enough for us to offer and support.

If you elect to use a cellular modem, support will be offered on a best-effort basis, though only on the connection between the hotspot and sensor. It is your responsibility to ensure that the site has sufficient signal strength to meet the required bandwidth requirements. It is also recommended to acquire a hotspot with ethernet-out. Particle Sense can show whether or not a sensor is connected via ethernet or Wi-Fi.

The following is only provided for reference; we do not offer any assistance when pursuing these solutions:

For outdoor continuous monitoring an enterprise grade cellular router with 10mbps bandwidth and 35GB minimum data requirements is recommended (you will be responsible for any overage charges). We have had a positive experience with Always Connect Solutions (ACS) testing a Cradlepoint device. Pollen Sense does not have an agreement with or any other affiliation with ACS. You may contact them if your IT department needs a place to begin. We worked with Ryan Biggs rbiggs@alwaysconnectsolutions.com C. (208) 972-1045 P. (208) 616-2334

Uptime Monitoring

It is highly recommended to configure network-level monitoring for the Sensor. One method Pollen Sense has used internally is to set up a server that will ping the sensor via its DHCP reserved or statically configured IP address and have notifications be sent to the team when a sensor drops off the network. There are lots of tools available to facilitate this. While uptime monitoring is unsupported by Pollen Sense, we do recommend using your own tooling to add this functionality on top of what Pollen Sense offers (as our current tooling has some lag time between a sensor not reporting to the cloud and a notification being sent to the user).