Transcript
Introduction to PMI View iOS
Welcome to the PMI View web training for iOS. This is going to be a full suite training for you to be able to use our free PMI View iOS app to view your recordings, connected devices, upload your recordings and move them around, and then we’ll also show you how to use the units themselves through PMI View iOS. Obviously, for this demonstration, you’ll need an iOS device if you want to follow along.
Navigating the Device Screen
Once you download our app, you’ll be met with the device screen, and if you haven’t connected to any devices yet, then you won’t have any here in this list. You can see here we have a couple of different ways you can navigate your devices through the app itself.
One way would be on the All tab that’s going to show you all of your devices, including locals, as well as any you’ve connected through IP address and your PQ Canvas account if you’re logged in through the Account tab. Moving over from devices on All, we have Nearby, which is just going to show your local devices that are currently broadcasting. You can see here we have some in the list, majority Seekers and Bolts, and then our new product, the Seeker Plus.
Then making our way over to Manual. Here, you’ll have all your devices that you’ve manually inputted the IP address for or you’ve manually made a connection with. They’ll be added in the history, and they will show you accordingly how you connected to them.
On the PQ tab, you have your PQ Canvas available devices. So if you have any devices that are exclusively available in PQ Canvas and you can’t access for whatever reason, they’re on private IP address or anything like that, this will use the best available connection method to connect to these devices. If it’s local in the area, it’ll do that. If it’s a public available IP address, you can click that, and it’ll take you to the device itself. You can see that we just connected to the Bolt.
Recent Tab and Filtering
We also have the Recent tab, which is going to show you the most recent device that you’ve connected to in history in ascending order. So here you can see the devices you’ve connected to in the past, and it’s kind of an easy way for you to check whether or not you’ve already downloaded a certain device.
You can also change the way it filters as well, so you can filter either by device type or serial number. You can deselect some of these that’ll show you only certain devices. Let’s say you only have to download Bolts today, so then you go and just unclick all the other devices, and that will just filter out Bolts. You can also hide device icons if you want to hide the images, but I find that that helps, especially if you don’t have them labeled as the device itself and who they belong to, which some people do.
Connecting to a Device
For this demonstration, we’re going to be connecting to this Bolt, Bolt serial number four five zero one six eight, and we’re going to be showing you how to navigate it. Within your device list itself, if you would ever like to remove any units, you would just click the circle with the three dots, and you can delete the device, or you can pin it at the top if this is a device that you frequently use or like downloading or checking up on.
For this demonstration, we’ll be connecting to this over cell. So this is a Bolt set up in tech support in the back of tech support, just for you guys to be able to see how it works, especially over cell because you never know when you might have to, “Hey, I forgot to initialize this device.” You’re in the truck. You can load up the app, connect to the unit, and initialize it. Or if you forgot to download it and only arrive just to check the physical connections and stuff like that, you could download it remotely as well.
Device Connection Screen
Once you click on your device and you have a successful connection to the device, you’ll see an animation of a waveform. Doesn’t matter what kind of device you’re connected to, you’ll always have this animation while you’re connected. It’s sure to show you how you’re connected in network connection itself as well. So here you can see we are connected over the Internet to this IP address.
At the top, you have your information button, which is going to give you diagnostic readings on the unit itself, as well as some little tidbits like what frequency it’s seeing, the hookup type, and the current range. And then also tells you when the timestamp was last updated. So you can see this is happening live. It is giving me live readout on what the device is doing at the moment. We also have the supercap percentage and a lithium battery percentage.
On cell devices, you can click over to the Cell tab, and you’ll get some cell modem information. This is going to give us the overall signal strength as well as specific indicators like the power of the radio, as well as the quality of the signal, how much noise is in the signal, et cetera. This is also updated live.
Hamburger Menu and User Manual
If you click on this, like I like to call it a little hamburger menu. In the hamburger menu, it’s going to specify to you again the serial number of the unit. You also have initialize here. You can initialize through this screen as well.
You can pull up the user manual for the unit, which is going to pull up a local version that’s also exportable, so you can share this or you can download it. This also has markup available, so you can draw on it if you need to remember your place. But this is the full Bolt user manual that’s available on our website, available through the app itself. So if you ever need to look something up in the field, then you have that possibility.
You can also save this to your files after you’ve marked up and highlighted stuff. You can search through the file itself too and use keywords, and you can save those changes as well to your files. So anything you do in here with this user manual, you can save.
Downloading Recordings
Making our way back to the app itself, PMI View has a lot of functionality as far as the downloading goes. Comparatively speaking to our PMI View Windows app, the iOS app is a full stop, so you can manage your device in here. You can obviously start new recordings and download recordings, but you can also still inspect settings and view live data readout as well, like waveforms, harmonics, vector, and harmonics metering.
If we start out now to download a recording, you can see here we have not downloaded a recording from this unit yet. You have two ways of navigating your recordings, which I’ll show you later. You can navigate per device or just what’s on the actual iPhone itself. So going to this pane here filters out the recordings that are stored on this iPhone per this device serial number, and we have none yet.
Let’s go ahead and download a recording. You can see that you get a progress bar as well as a loading screen, which will tell you where it’s at in the downloading stage. Once your recording is downloaded, you’ll see it pop up on that screen. You’ll get that notification that it’s done downloading.
Viewing Recording Details
You can go ahead and click on the recording, and here you have what our older ProVision users would consider this as their header report. This is the same thing. So here you have your title of the recording, along with the device serial number, when the file was created, any notes you might have added to the header report itself where you have those spare lines for notes.
You can adjust the time zone of the recording, as well as your start and end date, and then the duration of the recording, what platform it was. So this tells you this was a Bolt, the firmware, and the software that was used to download it, as well as the circuit type, current range, and interval. And if we make our way down, you have your traditional events tab as well that shows you any events that might have occurred on that recording.
You can go down, and this will tell you what measures were selected for the recording, as well as the settings that were used. So this one had everything enabled with no scale factors. Everything was one point zero zero times. You can see all the boxes are checked for channels one through three.
Graphs and Charts
Now we can make our way over to graphs, and this is going to show you the waveforms if there are any, strip chart information, histogram information, daily profile. And even within these individual sections, you have more options.
Here you can see the strip chart itself. We can also navigate this data. You can go to info and change out your axes as well. You can enable all the traces, and you can add something else to compare on the right-hand side. If you wanted to, say, view RMS voltage with your RMS current, it’s going to show you a scale on the right-hand side for your current and your voltage on your left-hand side. That’s going to be per channel. Just to make sure that you have a good view of all the data in the recording, you do have to navigate between the channels to view the differential data between them. But you do have the option of zooming in on this graph as well.
On the Waveforms tab, if there were any waveform captures for that recording, this is where they will be, where traditionally in ProVision or anything else like PQ Canvas, you have a separate window that pops up and shows you how many waveform captures you had for that recording. On here, it’s a separate tab.
On histograms, you can adjust what you’re viewing as far as the histograms go. So you click on this value over here, which says RMS voltage. Then you’re going to be able to click RMS current, go to reactive power. You can go to phase angle, and that again is going to be per channel, just so you can view all the data on one screen. Instead of having to zoom in straight from the jump, you can navigate per channel. You can also toggle the showing you your values on that graph itself on histograms.
Daily profile, same thing. Wherever you’re at as far as viewing data on any of these charts, you can click on the actual value displayed right here itself, and then you can pick what you’re showing. So let’s say voltage THD, and then we can display change some settings. You can change second chart enabled. You can change your chart color as well as your line width, and change the time format.
Managing and Exporting Recordings
When you’re done viewing your data and deciding what to do with it, if you decide you want to keep it on this phone, then all you have to do is back out, and it’s saved on the iPhone itself. If you’d like to add notes, you can add photos or add notes to this recording, as well as tag a location. You just enter in the address here or coordinates, and then click Save. And then you can attach photos here. Then you would just click Done.
Once you’re done, you can either rename the recording or delete the recording. Or if you go back to the Recordings tab, once you have the recording on your phone, you can go back to the Recordings tab on the main screen. So you would disconnect from the device, go here to Recordings, and then we can see here that the download is right here. So we can go to the recording itself.
Export and Transfer Methods
Now you can choose to export the recording, or you can just upload to your PQ Canvas account straight from here. These are the different transfer methods that you have available to you in PMI View iOS. You have PQ Canvas, Microsoft OneDrive, wireless transfer. So this is what we would call our web sync. Each one has their benefits, so if you don’t have currently a PQ Canvas account, you might want to do Microsoft OneDrive or wireless transfer, vice versa. But at least you have multiple ways to export.
PQ Canvas is going to make you log into your PQ Canvas account. So as long as you’re logged in, you can just click Upload, and you’ll get that little check mark next to the cloud showing you that it’s uploaded.
When you go to do web sync, it is imperative to remember that whatever computer that you want to transfer this recording to has to be connected to the same network as this iPhone. So if you have a desktop you want to transfer it to, you just have to make sure that the wireless network you’re connecting your iPhone to can communicate with the network the desktop is on. And then you would just open up a browser and type in this IP address, and that will pull up a screen where you can navigate your templates and recordings and export those to your PC. The iPhone will notify you again as a reminder that both devices need to be connected to the same network.
While you have your PQ Canvas account logged in here though, if you are in the field in an area where you don’t have the greatest cell service or cell signal, what the app will do is wait until you do arrive into an area where you have good cell service or internet, and then it will automatically upload those recordings to PQ Canvas if you are logged into your account. You can see here on the Recordings tab itself, you have another quick link to the web sync up here up top if you need to use it.
Starting a New Recording
Let’s go back to the device. So we downloaded a recording. We went over downloading a recording with this unit. You click on the downloaded recordings, and now we can see that that recording is in there filtered by this device.
To start a new recording, you can either inspect settings, and this would be the same function in ProVision that people know as retrieve settings. So you’ll inspect the settings on it, and then from there, you can either choose to use the settings that are currently on the device itself or modify them and then push them to the unit to start a new recording.
Here you can see that we are running a general purpose with all the settings turned on. Here we can either do an advanced configuration, which would be to modify these settings, or we can save this as a template, or we can apply a new template.
Advanced Configuration
We’re going to go ahead and click Advanced Configuration. Here you can adjust your recording interval on the main screen. This is the general page. So you have your recording interval and overwrite features. Probably two of the most adjustable settings where people change the most because they might need a different interval and might not want it to overwrite. So then you just select your interval. We’re going to go with fifteen seconds here.
Your waveform capture, and every single section has a question mark you can click for more information. This will pull up a glossary where you can read what the terms mean. So if you forget what the waveform captures are, you just click this and then click on Waveform. A waveform record includes sampled voltage and current data for all enabled channels. Then you can go into detail and read more power quality specifics for the term waveform. Once you’re done, you just click the X.
You can turn on periodic waveform captures, change your hookup type down here. So we’re going to go ahead and select one hundred, two hundred flex or TLARs. Click Done.
Strip Charts and Flicker Settings
Then this will take us to the Strip Charts page, which is next in the initialization screen. Here you can turn on harmonics. Let’s say I only want odds. Well, I’m going to click Odds, and it’s going to highlight all the odds all the way up to the fifty-first. Or you can do evens or clear or just do all.
Then we have flicker here. And up here in Interval, this is where you’re going to change the actual parameters that are being recorded for it. So you can turn on min, max, or average, turn them off. You can select all graphs. That’s going to be RMS voltage all the way down to IFL and PST flicker. On this page, once we’re done and we’re happy with what we have selected, we click Done. We’re going to go down some. And then again, you have your flicker interval, and this will pull up a terminology for flicker so that way you know what it is that you’re trying to record for.
Waveforms and Events Configuration
Making our way over to the Waveforms tab. Most of these are just like ProVision set up against industry standards, so you won’t be having to adjust these most of the time, especially if you’re using a template that’s pre-made for certain investigation types. But it’s here if you need it. And then there’s also glossaries for these things as well, so you can see what it is that you’re adjusting. Here you have your waveform cycles, your thresholds, your cross triggers. You can turn on cross triggers for event capture, enable or disable certain channels, and adjust your sample rate.
Making our way over to Events. Again, these are all set up against industry standards, so you won’t really have to adjust these unless you know absolutely what you’re chasing. We have a loose neutral parameter already set up to industry standard defaults. Same thing for flicker. Flicker already conforms to IEEE standard one forty-one. Abnormal voltage, there’s already tables built in here for everything from one twenty to four eighty. And of course, you have your SEBEMA.
Miscellaneous Settings and Initialization
And then the Miscellaneous tab. So here you can turn off and turn on overall voltage and current channels, as well as adjust your interval memory. Usually we keep that at a hundred percent. And then your hookup type again, significant change threshold, and any notes you want to add to your header report, you can add down here.
Once you’re happy with your settings, you’re going to go ahead and click Done. And it’s going to ask you if you would like to update a template or save as a new template. We’re just going to update the template on the unit and click Save. And it’s going to ask you if you would like to start a new recording with your template. You’re going to click Yes.
It saw that there was a recording on there. We already downloaded that recording, so we can just initialize anyways. And then you get this nice little status update at the top of the screen telling you how far in the initialization steps it is. Once it’s done, we’ll get the Finished. You’ll get a notification here at the bottom, and then your timer at the top starts to count down. And you have the option to set an event reminder to remind you once it’s done counting down that it started recording.
So now we can see it’s in countdown mode waiting to start recording. You have two minutes from when you initialize it, just like all of our other units, to make any adjustments to wiring, seal up the cabinet, whatever you need to do.
Viewing Live Data
While that countdown’s going on, you can still view live data, so you can see what it is that the unit is seeing in this current time, and your countdown timer will carry over to that screen with you. This is going to be live waveforms coming straight from the device at the moment, and you can navigate per channel.
On this screen, you can also navigate to the harmonics, and then you can also navigate to the phase angle diagram screen. This is going to give you a live readout. You can choose to freeze frame it by clicking this pause button up here, and you can also adjust your actual connections in here as well. So if you find out you got two channels swapped out, you can change this and unmap them. Same thing for your current.
Here, you can change the way that the waveforms are grouped by. So we can say By Measure. That’ll change the whole screen itself. And here you have channels one, two, and three. This is voltage. You can do your three-phase. You can do line to line. Changing your view can also change the data output. So if you have it set to line to line, you still have to go channel by channel. But if you’re doing, let’s say, By Measure, that does all of them, so this will be all three channels voltage, and then you need to navigate over to the side to see all three channels of current.
Live Harmonics and Metering
Now let’s go into the live harmonics meter. You have one for voltage, one for current. Same thing in here. You can freeze frame if you need to by pausing the screen. You can also remap your actual phase corrections. Then you can toggle fundamental or filter certain harmonics for a live readout.
This is a separate tab just for the voltage for the phase angle diagram on this unit. Then you have your live meter as well, which will give you a broken-down version of the same information. Let’s go ahead and refresh this connection.
The unit’s started recording. We can see the voltage readout and current on the phase angle diagram, a vector diagram. And then going to meter itself of a live readout. This is per channel and gives you everything from RMS voltage down to power factor and displacement power factor separated by three channels. Again, you can also view your phase correction here.
You have harmonics meter. This is also live, so it gives you an updated timestamp by the second at the top.
Firmware Updates
When you’re connecting to a device that’s not fully updated, when you first connect to it, you’ll get a notification up here at the top that’s telling you, “Hey, this device is out of date. Would you like to update the firmware?” The PMI View iOS app does have the capability of updating firmware.
If you make your way over to the main screen and then click More, this will take you to the More Options tab, and then you click on Recorder Updates. Here it’s going to tell you the latest version this app has available to it in order to do the PMI View firmware update. So here you can see the list of updates that it’s allowing you to download. Then it’ll download them when you have a steady network connection. That way, it’s on your device for when you’re ever in the field. Let’s say you don’t have good service when you’re actually next to the device, you can still update the firmware on it after downloading your recording.
Account Tab and PQ Canvas Login
Making our way over to the Account tab, this is where you’re going to log in to your PQ Canvas account if you have a PQ Canvas login. So you would click here, sign into your account. If you have multiple accounts, it’s going to ask you to pick which account you would like to go into. I’m going to go ahead and pick our PMI main account.
Now you can see I’m logged in, and it’ll tell me which account I’m in here, as well as the email that I just used to log in with and my name. The version of the app itself that we’re using, so if you ever give us a call and we ask you what your app version is, you can quickly find that here in Account and check your app version. And then you can log out here at the bottom as well.
Template Manager
Let’s make our way back over to the Recordings tab. Within the Recordings tab, you also have your template manager. In here, you can manage your templates that you might have stored in your PQ Canvas account itself, as well as any templates you might have already saved to your device as custom templates. And by device, I mean your iPhone or iPad. Set up new templates and then this will download all your PQ Canvas templates as well. You can also use WebSync to transfer templates back and forth between your PC and your iOS device.
Let’s go ahead and set up a new template. So we can see here we’ll do R. And we’re going to base it off of our voltage sag template. So what that’s going to do is pull the defaults that I have for the voltage sag template. Let’s say I want to enable the hookup correction and detection. This is going to be for a hundred, two hundred. I’m going to leave the recording interval at one cycle. Everything is checked over here in Interval. See waveforms and event capture. All these other values are correct. Voltage sag, and we’ll add another line here. And we’ll hit Done.
Now we can see here My Templates. I can click on this template now, and it’ll show me everything that I set up specifically for this template. Just a quick glance. If I need to modify anything after the fact, I can click on Advanced Configuration, and that’ll take me to editing the template all over again.
Device Compatibility
It’s important to note also that there’s multiple ways you can connect to different devices. The PMI View iOS app itself is compatible with Bolt, Seeker, Tensor, and Guardian, but does not communicate with USB-only devices and does not work with Bluetooth Eagles or Revolutions. The only ones of those class that it works with is Cell Revolutions.
You would go over here to this little box with a plus mark in the top right-hand corner, and you would either find a device if it’s locally broadcasting its Wi-Fi network, or you would go to Manual. Here you can enter a serial number to try to force a connection with a locally broadcasting device, so you would just put in the serial number. But if you have a device that you want to add the IP address for, like a Cell Revolution, Cell Guardian, Tensor, Bolt, a Seeker, doesn’t matter, you would go here, and then enter your IP address. And then for Revolutions, all you have to check is the Cell Revolution box. Otherwise, just make sure SSL is enabled, and then click Done, and you’ll add the device the same way we added our demo Bolt, serial number four five zero one six eight.
Device Logs and Troubleshooting
On this hamburger menu for the units itself, you can also disable any warning or alert thresholds that you might have had set up through PQ Canvas. You can turn your SSL on or off, and you also have the ability to download system logs.
The system logs is going to be very helpful for troubleshooting if you can get connected to the device. If you notice that something’s going on, maybe voltage-wise or it’s rebooting or anything like that, as long as you can get connected to it once and you’re logged into your PQ Canvas account, this will upload a copy of those logs straight to the back end of the PMI server, so that way when you call tech support, we already have a log we can pull up and see what the device is doing.
Here you can see in the More tab, it tells you how many uploaded device logs you have. Once it uploads that, you should lose that option here. So now we can tell that that device log was successfully uploaded to the PMI server.
Calibration Certificates and Glossary
In the More Options tab, you also have the ability to view your calibration certificates for any units. So let’s go ahead and, for example, use the four five. And this is going to tell me I can either preview it or save it. The green check mark indicates that it was able to find a calibration certificate for this unit. And then you have this in a shareable format. It goes into detail about the calibration date, the results, and the date the calibration certificate was issued, as well as some information on what the unit captured while it was having its accuracy test done. You can also share this like our other file, and you can mark it up as well if you need to, or you can quick search it. You can also save straight from this screen as well.
You also have quick access to the actual glossary that’s built into the app from this screen as well, so you can go and learn more power quality information on the go. You have your waveform and then any related concepts as well to that term and details, so you can go through and read these experts of texts that have descriptions of what each one might be used for in the power quality field.
Quick Tips and Wrap-Up
So we’ve gone over pretty much everything, PMI View iOS. Some quick tips I can recommend if you’re having any communication issues or trouble connecting to any devices:
- Make sure that your device is on the latest firmware, and if you don’t have any success connecting with the iOS app wirelessly, you can download our free Microsoft Store app version for your PC and connect your device to that. Make sure that it’s fully updated or pull a device log as well.
- Make sure that your iOS device is fully updated and that your PMI View iOS app is fully updated. Sometimes your organization doesn’t manage those things, so it’s always good to double-check that if you’re in the field and having some communication problems with your devices.
- Make sure that your Wi-Fi and your Bluetooth are on for this app. If you want to connect any devices locally, like our Wi-Fi Bolts and stuff like that, if you have that off, that will make connecting to the unit itself impossible.
That concludes our PMI View iOS training. If anybody has any questions, my name is Chris Arancibia. I am a tier two tech support. You guys are more than welcome to email us at support@powermonitors.com or give us a call at one eight hundred two nine six forty-one twenty. And I hope you guys have a good rest of your day.