Transcript
Introduction
Hi everyone. Welcome to today’s Ask a Pro session. I’m Andrew Kornfeld, one of the software engineers here at PMI, and I’m the author of this paper. Today we’re going to be talking about Revolution Download in PQ Canvass.
In this presentation we’re going to cover why Revolutions need a download feature in the first place, how to initiate a download from PQ Canvass web interface, the restart recording option and what it actually does, notifications timing and the automatic retry behavior. We’re also going to talk about how to access the completed recording, and finally viewing transient captures capability that’s unique to Revolutions within PMI’s product family.
If you have any questions or comments as we go, just type them in chat and we’ll go through them at the end.
Why Revolution Download?
Revolution Meters are compact cellular connected power monitors. If you’re familiar with PMI’s other product lines, Tensor, Seeker, Guardian, and Bolt, those devices initiate their own uploads to PQ Canvass. They push their recordings to the server on their own. Revolutions don’t do that. The recording has to be retrieved on the user’s behalf.
A Revolution Download is the feature that solves this. It lets you initiate a server side pull of the current recording directly from the PQ Canvass web interface.
How It Works
The whole flow at a high level: you click a button in PQ Canvass, the server connects to the Revolution through the Revolution cell modem, retrieves the current recording off the device, validates the file, and stores it in PQ Canvas. When the recording is ready to view, you get an email and optionally an SMS with a direct link. That’s the whole feature in one breath. Now let’s walk through each step in detail.
Quick Access View Page
Everything starts from the device page of a Revolution meter registered in PQ Canvass. From here, go ahead and click the Recordings button to get to the recordings page. On the recordings page, you’ll find the Download Recording button. You can click it to download a recording.
Two things worth noting here. The Revolution has to be online to access the Download Recording button, and this button only appears on Revolution device pages. Devices in the other PMI families upload their own recordings so they don’t need a server initiated pull.
Download Form
After clicking, you’ll get to a short form that collects the information PQ Canvass needs to file the recording once it arrives:
- Recording name, which is a free text label. If you leave it blank, PQ Canvass generates a name automatically: Revolution_the serial number then the date. And it automatically disambiguates duplicates.
- Folder, which PQ Canvass folder the recording gets filed under. Left blank, it goes into the account root uploaded folder.
- SMS notification, an optional ten-digit US phone number. If you provide one, a short text message with the view recording link is delivered when the download completes.
- Restart Recording after download. Checkbox that controls whether the device restarts recording once the download finishes. This one deserves its own section, so we’ll come back to it in a moment.
Once you submit the form, the download is queued and you can close the page. A single download can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours depending on the recording size and cell signal quality. You do not need to keep the page open, the notification will come to you.
Restart Recording Option
Here’s the thing to understand. Retrieving a recording from a Revolution requires stopping the recording that is currently in progress on the device. The Restart Recording after Download checkbox controls what happens next.
When the checkbox is off, which is the default, the device is returned to standby once the recording has been safely retrieved. It stays idle until a new recording is started manually either from PQ Canvass or on site.
When the checkbox is on, PQ Canvass automatically resends the device’s current recording parameters and instructs the device to begin a new recording using those same settings. So if your goal is continuous long term data collection, then this is the option to choose. You retrieve what’s been collected so far without leaving a gap in the data stream.
Notifications
When the download completes, PQ Canvass sends a “Your recording is ready” email to the email address on the requesting user’s PQ Canvass account. That email contains a direct link to view the recording. If you provided an SMS phone number on the form, a short text message with the same link is delivered at the same time.
Timing and Automatic Retries
Cellular connections come with variable latency and signal quality, so PQ Canvass handles transient connection problems automatically on your behalf. If the download doesn’t succeed on the first attempt, the server waits briefly and retries. No action is required from you and you won’t see the mid-retry churn. PQ Canvass only sends you a status message after the automatic retries have completed.
A couple of notes on concurrency. Multiple downloads for different devices can proceed in parallel but a given device can only have one download in flight at a time. So if you submit a second request for that same device while one is active, it’s rejected. Just go out and resubmit once the first one completes.
Accessing the Completed Recording
Once the recording download completes, the recording is validated by the same server side pipeline used for recordings that upload themselves from Tensor, Seeker, Guardian, and Bolt devices. After validation the recording appears in PQ Canvass indistinguishably from any other recording in your account. You can open it through the standard viewer, include it in reports, share it through distribution lists, and organize it into folders.
You could also run Merlin on downloaded Revolution recordings and IEEE five nineteen compliance analysis. Other PQ Canvass analytical features apply without modification. The link in the notification email opens the new recording directly, or you can navigate to the folder you chose on the download form and open it from there.
Viewing Transient Captures
Now for the part that is unique to Revolutions. Revolution meters are unique in PMI’s product family in that they can capture sub-cycle transient events at high resolution, and PQ Canvass exposes those captures through a dedicated report and per event waveform view.
On the Recording Overview page, the Events section lists the number of transient captures contained in the recording. Click that count to open the Transient Capture Report. The report lists each captured transient with its timestamp, cycle number, and duration. It also displays the threshold settings, threshold volts, and threshold percent per channel that determined which events the device recorded. So you can see not just what was captured but also why it was captured.
Clicking on an individual transient in the list opens the Per Channel Waveform View for that event, which plots the sub-cycle voltage and current excursions at millisecond resolution across all four channels. The navigation arrows at the top of the view let you page through every captured transient in the recording without going back to the report. This makes it straightforward to compare related events. For example, a series of transients produced by a single switching operation.
Recap
Revolutions don’t download their own recordings. PQ Canvass pulls them on demand. It’s one button and one short form, and then you can walk away. Email or SMS comes to you with a direct link. The Restart Recording option keeps long-term data collection gap free, and once a recording lands in PQ Canvass, it behaves just like any other recording. Same viewer, same reports, same distribution lists plus the transient captures that only Revolutions provide.
The big takeaway is that Revolution Download lets you retrieve recordings, resume data collection, and view results without dispatching a technician or connecting to the device directly so you can work with data from every PMI product family in a single platform.
That’s all we have for today. Be sure to check out these other links and resources. Thank you all for tuning in and have a great rest of your day.