Process Visualization Using rIoT Technology in 3 Simple Steps
What is rIoT Technology: rIoT Technology is an advanced cloud interface technology that allows you to collect your real-time process data securely and makes it available anywhere and anytime. For more information, please visit www.avistarts.com
In this blog, we show how easily you can visualize the data collected in the cloud platforms. In this example, we have a valve on the piping that goes to a pump. The purpose of this example is to show the ease of implementation. It is very easy to scale this implementation to a much larger piping or process schematics. The same steps can be applied to other systems such as Electric Networks, IT Networks, Facilities, etc.
1. Draw
The graphics are SVG based, therefore, you can use any SVG graphic editor to create your own graphics. In this example, we use a free tool called InkScape (www.inkscape.org) but again, you can use your own favorite editor to draw your images or convert the existing drawings from other formats such as CAD. We need to follow these steps to draw the main picture:
a. Draw the pump, pipe and valve in GE iFIX: Open iFIX Workspace, open valve, pump and pipe dynamos and throw one valve, one pipe and one pump on the picture. The resulting picture looks like the following. Note that the valve or other objects can be drawn in any other graphic editor as well.
Screen capture and copy/paste the picture into InkScape to create the background.
b. Find a gauge on Internet and add to the picture in InkScape. Here is the picture we are using:
c. Add animation objects to the picture. We add two rectangles to represent value position and pump pressure. We lay one of the rectangles on top of the gauge we downloaded from Internet. Add a path (a pseudo circle to animate a color rage). We add the path on top of the pump. The resulting image looks like this:
Make sure the name of the items that are to be animated start with “dga_”. Once all the elements are added, save the SVG file.
2. Link
Now, we need to link the SVG objects to realtime data. Open the rIoT explorer, click on Dynamic Graphics and then Configure graphics. It asks you to select a picture. Once the picture is loaded, all the animation objects show up on the left:
Right click on the object you like to animate and choose the type of animation. After you select the animation type, you need to fill the parameters such as range etc.
For this example, we choose Fill Animation for the valve position and pump pressure and Color Range for the path object.
3. Enjoy
Ok, we are almost there! In rIoT Explorer, connect to the target, click on Dynamic Graphics and then View graphic. The name of the configuration file plus the name of the graphic appears on the left. The left pane shows the name of all the images but note that we only added one image here.
Right click on the desired picture and click View. You will see a picture like this:
The height of the boxes is animated with values representing valve position and pump pressure. The color of the circle is linked to a random variable and animating a color range.
Note that you can open as many picture as you need to view the other parts of the process dynamically.
Next Step
If you are looking into managing your process and field data intelligently, we need to talk. This example showed you that using rIoT Technology, you can acquire your process data and push into IoT platforms such as AT&T M2X, Verizon Thingspace, Microsoft Power BI and GE Predix for further analysis. The data collected by the IoT platforms can be animated locally on the process schematics. Note that you can start with a single asset and expand to a large-scale implementation as you wish. For more information about rIoT Technology, please visit us at www.avistarts.com.
