Tip of the Day 83: Type and Location in Summary Values

 The Type / Location scheme is carried throughout the eDART. In fact every internal value that is used by different pieces of software is named with a "type" and a "location" and organized in the internal shared memory that way.

The "type" in summary values can be thought of as a type of calculation: Peak, Cycle Integral, Process Time etc. The location is generally the sensor from which the calculation came. A few measurements (like pack rate) were assumed to be based on a cavity rather than a sensor. Hence types like "Pack Rate" have only a "Cavity #whatever" instead of "Post Gate" and "End of Cavity". The pack rate is computed from the sensor designated for pack computations in the Sequence Settings. This has turned out to be rather inconsistent and should probably be changed to be sensor based.

Picking Type and Location

So the program that pops up when you click "Add Value" to Cycle Values, or "Add Alarm" or "Add Curve" is based on the type / location combination. There are a number of types that we hope to sort better some day. Once you pick a type you can then select from various locations from that type. This prevents you from seeing an entire list of 300 – 700 computed measurements.

Raw Data Viewer

Furthermore the "Raw Data Viewer" also shows type / location pairs. Many of these pairs are the ones you see in Sensor Locations (for inputs and outputs) or the computations created as summary values. But many of these can be neither plotted nor shown numerically. But the eDART knows that certain types mean certain things. For example "Diagnostic Info" type tells the Raw Data Viewer that the data comes from a Lynx™ port. The "location" is then the Lynx™ port number. When you look at details the Raw Data Viewer knows to display it in a certain way.