I'm an operator within a chemical
plant. Most of our data comes into PI via control
system. However, we do some lab analysis in the control
room and those devices are not instrumented so I'm going to use
PI Manual Logger to assist me getting data into PI.
Let me demonstrate that now. I'll start the
application. It's within the PI System
menu group, then within a
folder "PI Manual Logger".
The first thing I'll
see is a prompt for username and password. I'm going to use
a user that my PI Assist Admin has
provided to me for data entry.
What I see here is the
Manual Logger getting started display.
It includes many of the common tasks I might want to do
within Manual Logger. This includes manage tour
runs and enter manual data. All of the options found
here are also available through the toolbar
menus. I want to enter manual data so that's what I'm going to select
now. I'll see a new
window which has a list of tours. Again, with Manual
Logger terminology a tour is a set of tags for
which data will be collected. A tour run is the
actual data collection instance. Once I
choose a tour then I'll have a
prompt for a new tour run. What's included
here is the tour name, the operator
name--that's the user I'm logged on as--and then also a
timestamp. This is the tour
timestamp. Depending on how configured my tags
will likely inherit this timestamp. I have
some choices for changing the timestamp.
The plus and minus buttons let me move forward or backward an
hour and the zeros let me zero out the
minutes and seconds. That might be needed if I chose the
"now" button which would be precise time with perhaps
an odd time and odd seconds. I'm going to accept
that time and say "okay". Once I do that
I'm presented with the data entry
screen. On the left is general tour run info
including that timestamp that I accepted when I started the run.
I can still change that here if I desire.
In the data entry area I see the tag
name and spots to enter the value
and also a comment. The comment is optional.
I also see the tag is a timestamp that's been inherited from
the tour. Over in the right
pane I see tag info. The tab that's
selected is the tag attributes. At the
bottom I have a treeview that's a listing of all of my
tags. I can move or
navigate through the tour by selecting individual
tags. As I move to the second
tag the treeview notice that I've also moved to the
second tag in the data entry form. That's just two
ways of doing navigation.
Also available to me is previous values. I
see that that's a second tab across in tab
info. Once I select that I have a
table of data values and also a
chart. I can expand
the chart by clicking on the
trend button. This trend
is very much like the ProcessBook trend.
For the tag I selected it's a brand new tag so it has
no data only point created but let's look at some of the
features here. Some of the
tasks are very much the same as the ProcessBook trend.
One of those is
"zoom". I can left mouse click, drag to the right
and then release and what I'll have then
is the zoom on the Y and X axis just like the ProcessBook
trend. I can go back to original settings by clicking on the
revert button. We'll also see I have a trend cursor available to
me just like a ProcessBook trend. Finally I can add
a trace to this trend as well. I'm going to
close this now.
Now looking across the tabs
I've been focusing on the data entry form that
shows individual tags. There are other options across the
top. We'll see the data entry sheet which presents us more
of a spreadsheet form and I can enter values here and
comments as well. I prefer the data entry
form format so that's where I'll start.
I'm now ready to do my data
entry. So my first tag is "finished product
appearance". I'll notice at the bottom there are operator instructions
for me that assist me with how to take the
test. The data value
--since it's product appearance--is not a numeric value so I'm going to check
the drop down list. I'll see I have a choice of
clear, cloudy or dark. In addition there is
a choice for "no sample" at the bottom. Since this is separated by
space I know that this is an option for all the tags in my
tour. I'm going to choose cloudy because I've looked at the
sample and that's what it looks like.
That is all that is required for the data entry. To move
tag I can enter the number of the tag in the
list, use the arrow--which is probably the most
common option--or I can jump around
using this list here and that's what I'll do here just to show
I can do these out of order. So I'm going to pick "PH" next.
I accidentally hit a typo and entered
fifteen point three when I meant to type eleven
point three. You see there is some data validation here
and it checked me and told me that I must enter a PH between
zero and fourteen. So I'm going to
go correct that value.
And then I'll
see over here in my tag list I now have checkmarks by the
two values I've entered that's changed from the question mark
indicating that these have entered values.
So I'm going to move onto density.
One thing I'm checking over here in description and it talks about
entering the density using a hydrometer. I already know
this but in my case my hydrometer is broken and I can't do
the test so I can't enter a numeric value
here but I can take advantage now of this "no sample" option.
If I want to give more information I could actually enter a
comment so I'm going to do that here just to let someone know that the
reason why I didn't take a sample.
Okay,
now all of my values have been entered so I'm ready to
send these to PI. I can review these by
jumping around in the list or I can go on and
just send to PI. If I look at the toolbar options
at the bottom, as I hover over each of these I get tool tips.
Here is "send to PI". When I click on
this I'll see that my status updates. It has
very quickly sent data to PI.
So I could enter another tour at this time or exit
PI ML. I'm going to exit PI ML.
Normally I wouldn't check my
values but I'm training another operator alongside me so I want to demonstrate that the
values actually went into PI. To do this
I'm going to use PI DataLink. So
first I'll bring up Excel.
Once Excel comes up
I'm going to do a tag search and grab the tags that have been entering
data for.
All my tags are prefaced with an
ML so it's very easy to find them.
Now that I have the tag list I'm going to go and
grab the current values using the DataLink function.
Now I see the values as I
entered them in PI ML. I see no
sample for my product density, eleven point
three for PH and then
cloudy for the appearance. If you recall I also entered a
annotation on the density to explain the no
sample. There is not an option to see annotations and current values
so I'll go grab compressed values because there is
an annotation option there.
I'm just going to grab the most current value so I'm going to
go "start time of now" and just grab
one. I want to make sure I check off the annotation check
box here. Say,
"Okay"...oops; I actually missed my tag name.
Let me grab that here.
Okay, now I see I have the value
back and also the annotation that I entered in PI
ML--hydrometer is broken. So I've demonstrated
to the operator that I'm training that I can easily enter data
values in PI Manual Logger on the
PC and then show that the values are actually
into PI.