Glossary Of Terms


Access Rights:  

EnviroConnect users have two (2) types of access rights:
User Type – Admin/User. This differentiates whether a user can perform configuration tasks. Thus only Admin type of users can access Admin Tool and do EnviroConnect configuration


Device Access:

Read Only/Config. Access for each device – user pair is defined on device page. Those users who have access to the device as ‘Config’, can do all operations including configure data groups for monitoring, alarm acknowledgment, start / stop polling etc. Users with ‘Read Only’ access can do all operations except data group configuration, alarm acknowledgment and start / stop polling.


Alarm:

EnviroConnect allows limit based alarms to be defined for each variable (parameter) of a device. Total four (4) limits can be defined – low-low, low, high and high-high. For each limit, an alarm text can be given.


Device:

Device (asset) that is to be monitored.


Group Type:

Group Type is a grouping criteria for which user can create Groups. Group Type appears in the drop down box on EnviroConnect main page after log in. These are used for sorting devices in the tree on main page. eg. Site, Machine Type.


Group:

Groups are items under a Group Type. Each device belongs to a single group under every Group Type. Groups appearing under Group Type ‘Site’ are special groups and they represent sites on which RTDAS is running. They have some additional properties like name and password used for RTDAS authentication. Examples of Groups for Groups Types given above –
Group Type ‘Site’ – Site1, Site2
Group Type ‘Machine Type’ – Extruder, Injection Molding.


Protocol:

Contains information of protocol used for connecting to devices. For every protocol, parameters should be defined. When a device is defined, a protocol is specified for that device and values are assigned for protocol parameters. E.g. Modbus, OPC Name of the protocol must match name of device driver DLL for that protocol. Names and other properties of the protocol parameters must match with the names used by the corresponding device driver DLL.

Contact EnviroConnect Support for getting this information. E.g. For OPC protocol, following data must be configured –
Protocol Name = OPC.Name of DLL is OPC.dll
Protocol Parameters and their properties –
DAServer / Text / 255 / Required – Full name of OPC server
DAServerType / Text / 255 / Required – OPC
Server type – LOCAL / REMOTE
ServerMachine / Text / 255 / Not Required – OPC Server Machine name or IP address.
Needed only if OPC server is running on a different machine than RTDAS


Polling Frequency:

This is the frequency at which RTDAS polls the device. All variables of he device are polled at this frequency.


Reconnect Frequency:

If connection of RTDAS with a device is broken, RTDAS will try to reconnect to the device using this frequency


Upload Frequency:

This frequency is mainly used if RTDAS is not continuously connected to EnviroConnect server. In that scenario, RTDAS collects data polled from device in local files. At Upload Frequency, RTDAS will dial-up and connect to web server and send the collected data. Same mechanism is used if continuous connection to web server breaks due to some reason and RTDAS has to collect data in local files. RTDAS also reads any configuration change requests from the server at this frequency. Examples of requests – polling frequency change, variable modification etc.


User:

EnviroConnect users. See ‘Access Rights’ entry for details.


Variable:

A variable represents a parameter of the device that is to be monitored. RTDAS will read values of the variable at given polling frequency and send to EnviroConnect server.