In this article you are going to learn how to modify existing parameters in the Platform: change their units or conversion factors to adapt them to your projects.
Introduction
In the Parameters section, you can customise the parameters in your account. There are 2 sections in this menu:
- Basic Parameters: Each parameter in the platform has a basic type, which usually stores the cumulated or average readings for that parameter. From these values, the platform calculates all the frequencies.
- Calculated Parameters: calculated parameters include the consumptions over a certain period of time or the average power for a given period. There is a different entry for each frequency of each parameter.
In this article, we will cover how to modify the units used by a parameter, as well as how to apply conversion factors.
Requirements
In order to access the Settings menu, you need to have administrator rights in the Platform.
How does it work?
To access the Parameters menu, go to Settings --> Parameters. You will see there a list of the available parameters in your account, which includes all the parameters from all the devices in your account.
If you click on the name of the parameter or on the edit button, you will access the configuration menu for that parameter. For this example, we will modify the Thermal Energy parameter.
Please note that all changes applied in this section will apply to ALL the devices that use this parameter in your account.
Modify units
You can change the default unit of any parameter in your list by changing the Units field in the form above.
Let's apply this in an example. By default, most energy parameters in the platform are measured in kWh. The platform's data processing engine will process the readings being sent to the gateways and apply the unit listed in the parameters section.
If the data you are receiving in the platform is in MWh you can directly change the unit and it will be applied to all the screens in the platform:
You will have to reproduce this for all the Calculated parameter's that are related to the basic parameter. You can find them in the Calculated parameters tab. In this case, we would change the following calculated parameters:
If we introduce the following thermal energy monthly consumption readings:
| Timestamp | Value |
|---|---|
| 01/01/19 00:00 | 1 |
| 01/02/19 00:00 | 1.3 |
| 01/03/19 00:00 | 1.3 |
| 01/04/19 00:00 | 0.8 |
| 01/05/19 00:00 | 0.6 |
| 01/06/19 00:00 | 0.5 |
| 01/07/19 00:00 | 0.3 |
| 01/08/19 00:00 | 0.3 |
| 01/09/19 00:00 | 0.5 |
| 01/10/19 00:00 | 0.7 |
| 01/11/19 00:00 | 0.8 |
| 01/12/19 00:00 | 0.9 |
and we specified the unit as MWh for the calculated parameter in the monthly resolution, then we will see the following chart in the consumption screen:
We can see that the Y-Axis is in the unit we specified, and the order of magnitude of the readings is correct.
Conversion factors
The previous example works if the readings that are being sent are in the same order of magnitude as the units that we want. But what if our gateway gets kWh data and we want to analyse our data in MWh? We can apply a conversion factor in the parameter configuration.
If we have introduced the following thermal energy monthly consumption readings:
| Timestamp | Value |
|---|---|
| 01/01/19 00:00 | 1000 |
| 01/02/19 00:00 | 1400 |
| 01/03/19 00:00 | 1300 |
| 01/04/19 00:00 | 800 |
| 01/05/19 00:00 | 600 |
| 01/06/19 00:00 | 500 |
| 01/07/19 00:00 | 300 |
| 01/08/19 00:00 | 300 |
| 01/09/19 00:00 | 500 |
| 01/10/19 00:00 | 700 |
| 01/11/19 00:00 | 800 |
| 01/12/19 00:00 | 900 |
| 01/01/20 00:00 | 1100 |
| 01/02/20 00:00 | 1000 |
And our parameters have kWh as unit we will see the following chart in the consumption screen:
But we can edit the parameter (in our example, the thermal energy monthly consumption), in order to convert the kWh into MWh, by changin the Unit field and adding a Formula:
The formula field will accept simple formulas, where x is the parameter as it is stored in the platform. The formula listed here will be applied to the parameter in all of the platform's screens: