Transcript
Introduction
Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s Ask a Pro session. I’m Scott Windsor, the lead software engineer over here at PMI. Today, we’re gonna be talking about switching your workflow from ProVision to PQ Canvas, how you can do that, and more importantly, why you should do that. Let’s dive into it.
What Are ProVision and PQ Canvas?
I’m sure most of y’all are already familiar with ProVision, but if you aren’t, it’s our Windows desktop application that lets you manage your PMI recorders, configure and download recordings, and perform analysis of interval and waveform data.
PQ Canvas is our subscription-based cloud software for power quality analysis. It has all the same features you’re used to using in ProVision and so much more.
Why You Should Switch to PQ Canvas
So why should you even switch? What are you actually going to gain from switching to PQ Canvas? After all, ProVision is free. PQ Canvas is a subscription service. Understandably, you wanna know what you’re gonna get in terms of value for that money that you can’t already get with ProVision. I like to summarize it with the answer, with PQ Canvas, you’ll get more out of your data in less time. Simple as that.
With PQ Canvas, as you can see here on the slides, we gain:
- Secure cloud access to our streamed and uploaded recordings from anywhere. As long as you got an internet connection and web browser, you’ve got your stuff.
- Unlimited storage
- Automated alerts on power quality events — as long as you’re connected to your device, you can get those alerts real time
- Time-saving analysis tools and compliance reports
- Integration with our iOS and desktop PMI View apps
- You get to keep all your old recordings, as long as you upload them to PQ Canvas
- Support for next gen PMI recorders, as well as your current or even legacy recorders
- More live data, including symmetrical components, voltage imbalance, and soon we’re rolling out some more advanced cell stats and GPS status this quarter, next quarter
We’re constantly improving all these tools, and you don’t have the hassle of dealing with all the IT infrastructure permissions. You know, do I have admin rights to install this? You go to the website, it’s updated. You’re there.
So switching means faster analysis, simplified IT processes, and a smoother path to future-ready power quality monitoring.
How to Start Switching
So how do you start switching? What do you need? First step is going to be contacting your PMI sales rep and signing your organization up for PQ Canvas.
Next, you’re going to need to identify any recorders that you’re gonna want to stream to PQ Canvas, if that’s gonna be your workflow. If you plan to use Wi-Fi or cell-enabled recorders on a private network, you’re gonna need a private tunnel to be able to talk to your recorders from PQ Canvas.
They’ll be able to stream data up to PQ Canvas just fine without it, as long as your network routing is set up to reach our servers. But reaching out from PQ Canvas to your devices into your private network will require a private tunnel. That would be to enable things like viewing your live data, initialization, et cetera.
You still could do those things with our PMI View tools that we provide, as well as your USB connection and things like that inside your private network. But to do it from the website, you’ll have to have a tunnel. Your sales representative can walk you through all this and help you get all that set up at the same time.
Enabling Your Recorders for PQ Canvas
The next step will be actually enabling your recorders to stream data to PQ Canvas. Most of our new recorders have been enabled to do this already, but our previous recorders, and certainly the legacy ones, aren’t shipped with that enabled. So you’ll need to reach out to technical support, and they can very quickly help ensure all your recorders are ready for PQ Canvas.
All you’ll need is for each recorder, its serial number and a USB, cell, Ethernet, or Wi-Fi connection. The support rep can verify your PQ Canvas account info, your company name, address, contact info, et cetera, and then proceed to enabling the recorder in our PQ Canvas database.
Next, they’ll need to send some settings to your recorder or guide you through sending them in the event that you’re only able to connect with USB or you’re on a private network, so then the support rep can’t remote in to do it for you.
Our support group is well-versed in working with IT departments to get you the tools, software, drivers, whatever, installed on your systems as needed to facilitate this. We understand there’s complexities for the security policies, user permissions, and we have multiple approaches to getting you the tools you need to configure and communicate with your recorders.
Uploading Recordings to PQ Canvas
So what about all your old recordings and even new recordings? How do you get them into PQ Canvas? Let’s say you can’t set up streaming and you need all your old recordings that you’ve previously downloaded with ProVision. We’re gonna walk through those two workflows, and they’re really simple.
ProVision to PQ Canvas Workflow
We’re gonna pull up ProVision, and you can see here I’ve already downloaded two recordings from a Guardian. All you have to do is go up here to File, PQ Canvas. It’s gonna open our PQ Canvas window where you will sign in using your username and password that when you signed up your organization for PQ Canvas, these will have been established. And you’ll just click Log In.
In rare cases for customers, but for me, I have to select an account, but normally you have one account as a customer, and it’ll be preselected for you. But in this case, if you need to, you can select what account you need to be in, and you can see the screen change there to say, “Hey, these are the recordings that account has access to.”
So up here, I’m gonna select my two recordings, and I’m just going to drag them down here to where I want them, and that’ll open the upload window. As you can see here, it confirms the two recordings that I wanna upload, and I say Upload. These are only about a one-day recording, so they are gonna go very fast. If you had, say, a month-long recording, obviously it’ll take a little bit longer. And if you had dozens or hundreds of recordings, it’s gonna scale linearly with the amount you’re trying to upload all at once. But it appears they have uploaded.
Verifying Uploads in PQ Canvas
So we’re gonna switch over to PQ Canvas. Now I’m up in PQ Canvas. I’m already signed in, and I’m on the device page here to see the devices that I have available to me. This is the one we just uploaded some devices for.
What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go down here to the Recordings button, and this will show us all of our recordings. Some of these are streamed, as you can see here. Here is that Guardian streaming up a recording. But we wanna go to Uploaded, and we’re gonna see these two recordings we just uploaded.
We’ll click into one just to verify that it, in fact, has some data. Can see we’ve got a couple waveform captures. There you go. Nice waveform capture. Look at a few more. And we can even look at a strip chart. I have it hooked up in a weird way so we could generate some alerts.
If we go back to the device page here, you can see there’s a real-time alert occurring for this device. And if I click on them, you can see here, our power and our current are all out of whack. Looks like potentially one more, or even our voltage. And you see the timestamps on these. These are rolling in.
Then here it’s gonna list the latest of my streamed recordings. And so I can quickly go to that and see what’s happening right now with the data streaming up. And again, I can see my waveform captures and other events such as significant change or whatever you’ve set up your recorder to actually record. So you can see there how easily and quickly you can get your old recordings from ProVision up into here and just get going.
Using PMI View to Upload Recordings
We’re gonna open the PMI View application. This is a Windows desktop application to facilitate connecting to your recorders, configuring recordings on them, and uploading those recordings you’ve downloaded into PQ Canvas. Because we realize you can’t always be streaming up to our servers. Depending upon the situation, you may not have a cell plan, you may not have connectivity, you maybe can’t connect to Wi-Fi, you have to do USB downloads.
We have videos on how to use this software. I’m not gonna dive down into that today, but we’re gonna click on this one I have pre-set up. I’m connected via Wi-Fi to it, and this is that same Guardian, and we can see live data for it, all kinds of stuff.
So we’re gonna download a recording real time and see how does our workflow for getting a recording actively off that device and up into PQ Canvas using one of these helper tools. This is something we expect both the power quality analysts and people back at the station can use, back at the utilities, but this could also be the technician in the field, depending upon your workflow, the situation.
This should go fairly quickly. You see we’re almost done. We will see the recording show up in this Recordings tab on the left, and there we go. Download complete. And if we click over in here, we can see our recording.
Now, how do we get it up into PQ Canvas? Right up in here, we click on Sign In to PQ Canvas, enter our credentials. And we’re gonna say Remember Me, and go ahead and sign on in.
What will happen is when I’m signed in, these recordings are gonna automatically upload for you. You won’t have to go in here and remember to do it. As long as you’re signed in and you have an internet connection, they’re gonna upload for you. So you can see, there it goes. We’ve tried to make these processes as streamlined and user-friendly as possible. The less you have to remember to do, the better.
We’re gonna go back up here to PQ Canvas, click on our Recordings tab, and we probably have to click Refresh here. Yep. And then you can see, here is our newly downloaded and now uploaded to PQ Canvas recording, where we can, much like we did before, go ahead and look at waveforms, strip charts, et cetera. That’s how easy it is.
Wrap-Up
I’m not gonna dive into all the things you can do with PQ Canvas. We have more videos and instructions on that, which I’ll have some links in just a few minutes here about that. But all those same reports and things like that that you used to do in ProVision, you can do up here.
Hopefully that was very informative. If you do have any questions that you think of after this, feel free to reach out to our tech support, and we’ll be happy to answer them. But otherwise, that just about does it, and have a great rest of your day.
