Headline features in V6-2 include the new Radar Area Chart graph style which allows multiple polygons to be drawn within a single radar plot. The Collector also has a new Script based Plug-in DLL which allows data from virtually any third party application to be historized and trended within Sapphire.
Various usability improvements have been made to stPro allow group and linked pen scales to be set up more quickly and to aid pen ordering changes. The Plot Data Viewer in available in stOCX for the first time and has been enhanced to show 1 min, 6 min, hourly and daily averages in addition to the existing spot values.
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Radar Area Charts - Traditional Radar plots in stPro distribute the pens evenly round a single polygon, with
options to alarm based on minimum and maximum target values.
The new Radar Area Charts allow the user to determine the number of radials to display on the radar, so if a plot has 12 pens and the user selected to display 6 radials, then two polygons will be displayed.
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Radar Area Charts provide an excellent way to compare two data sets of like data. For example, comparing multiple
temperatures at a range of heights for a given vessel. The temperatures at each height can be assigned to their
own polygon allowing the relative temperatures at the heights to be easily compared.
Another use would be comparing the temperatures between different vessels, where each vessel is assigned to it's own polygon so the relative values from the two vessels can easily be seen.
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Radar Area Charts provide an excellent way to compare two data sets of like data. For example, comparing multiple
temperatures at a range of heights for a given vessel. The temperatures at each height can be assigned to their
own polygon allowing the relative temperatures at the heights to be easily compared.
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Data Viewer Averages - The Data Viewer provides a tabular representation of the data with a plot, allowing the user to quickly sort the values to find the minimum and maximum values within a plot. It also allows the plot cursor to be driven by value sequence rather than time ordering making it easy to
traverse the peaks for items on the plots.
For release V6-2 a feature was added allowing the user to choose to see a range of averages in the Data Viewer instead of just the 'spot' value used in the trend.
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stPro Enhancements - A range of enhancements have been made to stPro to improve its usability:
(Click to view) - Right-click pen scales - The scale mode of pens can now be set via the Item Details Area right-click menus allowing pens scales to be linked quickly without using the Plot Properties dialog.
- Plot Level Fit to Scale - The option to re-calculate the Scale of pens in Auto Scale mode has now been made a plot preference allowing different trends to have different behavioural settings.
- Grid Time Snap - The logic used to snap the grid lines to time periods has been improved so that the vertical lines snap to day/hour/minute boundaries more consistently
- Vertical Grid Spacing - The spacing between the vertical plot grid lines can now be adjusted on a per plot basis via the new Y-axis Grid control on the Plot Properties Preferences tab.
- Improved Time Labelling - The Time axis labelling has been improved for strip charts to make it easier to pick out day boundaries, the start of months etc.
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The __Script__ Plug-in Dll - The Sapphire Collector supports a range of standard Plug-ins allowing a wealth of data to be
collected and historized beyond traditional OPC.
- SNMP - The Simple Network Management Protocol plug-in allows values from network devices such as servers, printers, hubs, switches and routers to be collected.
- WinPerf - The Windows Performance Counter plug-in allows operating system, application, service or driver performance data to be collected. This can be very useful for analysing resources leaks (memory, handles or threads for example) in troublesome applications or software.
- Ping - The Network performance Ping plug-in allows the average, max, min ping times, plus the Time To Live (TTL) and percentage packet loss for network end points to be historized.
One example use would be to execute a Python script to query a specific weather station via HTTP/JSON requests. Similar API's exist for a variety of data, from Stock and Shares to Environmental data. If it can be queried, it can be historized in Sapphire!
Example output format (in this instance Financial data):
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FTSE.Price,7412.01
FTSE.Change,+33.62
FTSE.Open,7378.39
FTSE250.Price,19511.82
FTSE250.Change,+103.46 FTSE250.Open,19408.36
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Importing CSV Data - In addition to a executing scripts the __Script__ plug-in can also execute MS-DOS batch
files. A very simple use for this is to import CSV files generated by third party applications into Sapphire by
simply 'Typing' the file, thereby sending its contents to std out so the data can be imported into the Collector.
Example MS-DOS Batch file "DumpCSV.bat":
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@echo off
type "\\CRAN01ZZSMS04\Exports\1MinData.CSV"-
[WWN]
Script="D:\MyCSV\DumpCSV.bat"
DeadBandSecs=10
LogOutput=1
TurnMissingItemsOffline=0
Offset=00:03:00
