Trend View Suggestions

[deep6ixed]

After getting in the field with Do-More, I've grown to love the options I have, especially with analog.  One of the suggestions I've come up with is adding more features to the trend view feature.  Currently one of our machines is having issues (not related to the Do-More) and trend view has allowed us to fix it by recording analog values from the DC drives. 

What would make this tool perfect? Add the ability to recall stored data in the graph form that you have when viewing in before exporting.  And with the release of DmD 1.3.1 and the OEM tool to install new programs / firmware for end users, what about a similar program for trend view?  End user has the .EXE file and then the OEM can setup a trend that they want to record, send it to the end user, and then get the data file back for review.

 

[franji1]

We are currently working on that EXACT feature.  It is a little complex, so we could not get it into 1.3, but it should be available in a future release.

[franji1]

We are currently working on that EXACT feature.  It is a little complex, so we could not get it into 1.3, but it should be available in a future release.

BTW, the new .CSV Trend View export format that is part of 1.3 imports into Excel, which has WAY more graphing capabilities than Designer will ever have.  See the attached screen shot for an example

The new format basically dumps ALL the values in a Trend View in a single line, at a specified heart beat (default is one data set per second).  You can configure the heart beat by right clicking on a specific Trend View and select "Options for All Trend Views" (it's just the application level options for Trend View, you can actually configure just the CURRENT view from this dialog, which is what you will be doing).

Find the Export/Logging method group and select the first radio button Log values for all elmeents on a specified time interval, and tweak the interval.  The fastest interval is 100ms.

Make sure you have a fast enough PC, a lot of free disk space, then go back to the Trend View and hit the Record button on the toolbar (it is the red VCR Record looking button) and it will start logging IMMEDIATELY in that CSV form to a temporary file.  Once you hit the STOP button (the red circle changed to a square VCR stop button when you hit the Record button), then it will prompt you for YOUR file name and save the data there (make sure you enter the extension .CSV so it will import into Excel nicely).

Usually all you have to do is double click on the .CSV and it will load it into Excel.  Open Office's Calculate can handle .CSV also, but I don't know the graphing capabilities of Open Office.

You can also just EXPORT the current data set within a Trend View's history by hitting the Export button on the Trend View toolbar.  It's the button with a red arrow pointing up on top of a small trend graph with the letters "Exp" at the bottom.  So, use RECORD to START recording data NOW, and use EXPORT to export the current set of historical data for that Trend View.

You can do this all with the current 1.3.  Attached to this post is a screen shot of Excel with some process data from the PID1.dmd example project where the temperature goes into High alarm (Y2 turns ON at 26:03.9 when the temperature SimPID.PV exceeds 300 degrees F).  The log contains just 21 seconds worth of data from the PID view, logging one data set every 1 second (PID view is just a specialized trend view, but it supports the same functionality above).  I'm not an Excel graphing guy, but you can do a lot of cool stuff with this.  The log/export mechanism prepends the current Date/Time stamp to each line.  Note that the first line in the file is the header which shows the data point names for that column.

.CSV text files can also be imported into most database packages.

[Controls Guy]

What a completely awesome feature! Thanks, Hosties!

Recommend making the date stamp an actual Excel time value (floating point days since 1-1-1900 or something like that).  Then the user can format it however they like, do math on the date values, etc.  (I'm only assuming it isn't already a native time value because the date and time are in two different columns)

[franji1]

Recommend making the date stamp an actual Excel time value (floating point days since 1-1-1900 or something like that).  Then the user can format it however they like, do math on the date values, etc.  (I'm only assuming it isn't already a native time value because the date and time are in two different columns)

Excel auto-formats it to a date and a time, - no need to force a non-human-readable date/time floating point value.  Excel knows how to parse text as date, time, so nothing to worry about.  If you want that special floating point value in Excel, I'm sure Excel has macros on how to convert one of its date values and one of its time values to the specific floating point value YOU want.

Excel is great at doing what Excel does.  Human readable export (for ALL programs, not just Excel) is what Do-more does.

[Controls Guy]

Oh OK, didn't realize Excel would still recognize it as a date/time if it came in as text.   That's actually the best of both worlds then, it still works correctly in Excel plus you can read it if you just look at the file or work on it with another program.   Cool.

[franji1]

Excel is pretty smart about formats.  However, sometimes a number IS text (e.g. a zipcode), but Excel does not know that.  HOWEVER, if you put the zipcode in double quotes (e.g. "02134") in the text CSV file, Excel's import WILL process it as TEXT.  You will notice that we sometimes export fields in double quotes because sometimes they could have a number but it is really text (e.g. wiring info).