I'm Bob Cooperman at AEMC and I'm going to talk about the SD card feature
of the PowerPad III instrument series. The PowerPad III includes the models 8336, 8333 and 8435.
Now the PowerPad III instrument series measures
many different quantities about voltage, current, power and harmonics.
This adds up to a lot of data storage. The instrument has an SD card storage.
In 2 weeks it will store about 2GB of data.
This instrument series can record 2GB on a card, and that's the limit, even if it’s
a card that's larger, up to 32GB.
Before our new feature to directly copy the data, you'd have to use the USB interface
to the DataView PowerPad III Control Panel Software
which would take about 24 hours, maybe a little less, maybe a little more,
maybe up to 30 hours, to download all that to the PC.
Now as you can see, we have the time started and ended, about 2 weeks. Then I double-click
on this and then it will just start downloading.
So, you wait 20 hours for the download, or we can use our new feature which is to directly
transfer the data from the card.
The data in the card is not a Windows formatted SD card.
Our control panel software has a special utility now, to copy that data.
So, let's try to download from the card.
OK, now we are going to copy the SD card from the instrument. So there are a few steps we have to do first.
First we have to prepare some tools we'll need. One is a screwdriver, the bigger the better, flat head.
A large coin. The largest coin you have, a US quarter sort of works but bigger would even be better.
Now before we open up the instrument, we have to disconnect everything to avoid any shock hazard.
So, we unplug the power supply, and anything else
The USB and all of the leads, current probes, and
especially important, the voltage leads. That is to prevent any hazard of shock.
Now we have the instrument with nothing connected.
We turn it over. OK, so the first step is we have to remove the cover.
If the stand is in place we actually remove it,
and we can turn these thumb screws with a coin. We can also use a screwdriver, although
that will tend to wear out those screws.
Now to pry this off we can use a screwdriver. We can also use the case and pull that directly.
It’s a little more difficult. Then we have to not
let the case be separated from its holder. The screwdriver works well also.
Now we have to remove the battery. We don't want to disconnect the battery, so we hold
onto it as it falls out and we turn the instrument over
and just let it drop before we catch it. Now make sure we don't let this get disconnected.
This is the battery connector. Now to remove the SD card, push down this
plastic tab and push in the SD card until the spring
releases it. Then just slide it out. And then, it is important that we set the
lock tab of the SD card. So we push this slider down here away from
the metal tabs of the SD card. That sets it to lock.
OK, so now the reason we do that, is we don't want to lose our data on this card.
We have 2 weeks of recording. It might be hard to go back to the same location to record that.
If we format that on the Windows PC, we have lost the data.
The formatting process overwrites certain
blocks that makes it essentially impossible to recover the
recording, even though most of it is not overwritten, but the critical parts are.
So, we don't want to do that. So we have the lock tab on.
Now we are going to our PC and we're going to transfer it using the DataView PowerPad III Control Panel program.
OK, I inserted the card in the card reader.
What pops up in the Windows Screen is Microsoft Windows, you need to format the disk in
drive E: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?
The answer is definitely no. So definitely cancel. But try to remember the name the letter
of the drive before you do that though. It is drive E: and I hit cancel.
So we have 2 steps to try to prevent the loss
of data. One is we put the write protect tab, the other
one is we say cancel. Both prevent the card data from being overwritten.
Now we run our software, the DataView PowerPad III Control Panel, and we find under the file menu
the option to Read SD Card.
Now, a couple things about when this can be used. It needs Windows Vista or later and
it also needs an instrument firmware at the latest version,
which is 4.1, or anything later we might have. Also the 8435, is the waterproof version of
this instrument and that one the SD card is just not
accessible. So that's one you really cannot use this feature on.
Because you can't easily get at that card, because it's waterproof essentially.
So we click Read SD card, and then we see Search for SD card drive. It’s going to
search through possible drive letters, and it will generally
also find an empty DVD or CD ROM drive. That's not the
one we want. So we want to select the letter we saw,
when we put the card in, the one it wants to format. That was Drive letter E:.
And then, we select the correct drive and then we select Read from SD card.
And it might give an error message that it can't read in that case there was a reason
it couldn't read the data, otherwise it is just going to read it.
If it happens to include an EN 50160 test,
which is a special kind of voltage quality test, it would ask
you if you want to later download the rest of the data,
because only the trend data is on the SD card. The rest of the data, such as alarms, transients,
inrush, photographs, those remain on the instrument's internal memory, not in the SD card.
In the case of the of the EN 50160 test, there is some of both.
So then what would happen if you answered yes, to that question, the next time you connect to that
instrument, it would download the rest of the data and
then combine it with the data from the SD card to give
you a complete report. And if you said no to the question, it would
treat it like it was a trend recording only. OK, so now we have downloaded the recording
and the index has been rebuilt, and we can doubleclick
this, and we can see a recording now. This large data takes a couple seconds to
display. So here we have a recording. And now that we know we received it, we want
to put the SD card back in the instrument so we can
reuse it. Now we place the card back in the instrument.
Step 1 is we unlock the card, so we move the tab here in the direction that is towards
the metal tabs of the card.
So now it is unlocked. Then we just push it down at this location
towards into the instrument and we listen for that little click so it is in place.
Then we place the battery. We make sure we
didn't disconnect the battery, and we just put the
battery back in place. Then we put the cover back on.
Sometimes these little screws have gotten turned when it was out of the instrument,
so make sure they are back in horizontal.
Find the two little tabs put them in the catch at the end of the instrument there.
Push it down until it is nice and tight and then turn the screws to the vertical again.
And then you can leave the holder on or off. Turn it back over and you can turn on the
instrument and make sure it works. We can start reconnecting our power.
We can reconnect the various probes. And then we want to make sure we put the card
back, so we go to the lower middle blue button. That's is where recording is. Then we use
the button that shows new recordings, and it shows you can.
There are three ways to put the card back incorrectly. In this case you turn it on, you press the
lower middle blue button, and it say no memory card installed.
So what went wrong?
Let's turn it off again. Open the case just as we did before.
Get the piece of plastic out of the way. We turn these screws to be horizontal.
Use the screwdriver to pull off this part. Turn it over to pull out the battery.
Then we see we didn't push the card in far enough in. It has to click.
Now we put the battery back in again, replace the cover, turn the screws to be vertical.
And turn on the instrument. Again we press the lower middle blue button.
Try to press the start recording button and it says Protected Memory Card.
That's because we left the tab in the read only position. So we turn it off again, take
out the card again.
And we make sure we set it to the regular read-write position, which is closest to the
tabs there. Unlocked.
Place it again carefully and make sure it clicks.
And this time let's see what would happen if we were to have disconnected our battery.
Turn on the instrument, nothing happens. Ok, so now we're going to plug in the AC cord.
Notice the light is on in the Power Switch. Press the power button and it does power on.
So the only way to tell that battery wasn't properly connected is we unplug the AC power
and it goes off instantly.
We open the case again. This time we are going to plug it in again.
There's only one direction this battery plug can go.
You'll see the way it is bent already. It's probably the way it is going to go.
It will fit in that way. The two little tabs are on top and they go on top there.
If you try to put it in the wrong way, it just won't fit.
Put it in the correct way, you want to make sure it is fully in.
You can use the screwdriver to just gently push it fully in.
Place the battery pack carefully in the compartment. Put the cover back on.
And now we try to turn it on. And it goes on.
So those are three possible ways that there could be an error in putting the card back.
To not put in until it clicks or to not put in read-write mode which is unlock
mode or to have accidentally disconnected the battery.
So what we did is copied the trend recording from the instrument's card directly to the
PC, which took about 7 minutes.
Could be faster with a faster PC or faster card.
And that's instead of about 20 hours or even more than 20 hours that it would have taken
to do the download by the USB connection.