User guide

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addVANTAGE Pro 6.2 User Guide CHAPTER 2
Navigating the Data
Objects in the Explorer
Use the Explorer to navigate through all the objects in your system: areas, RTUs
(devices), tags (sensors), extensions, and panels. All such objects are
generically called nodes. You can open more than one Explorer at once, each
showing different levels of the system tree. You can also move certain node
types from one area to another.
After opening an Explorer, expand the root node, which will probably show only
areas, RTUs, and tags. In order to familiarize you with the new terms, Figure 4
shows most of the node types available in the tree structure. You probably won’t
have all of them in your tree, but you will be able to generate them later.
The root node contains all the objects in a system. You can also think of it as the
container for the database on a server.
Figure 4. Expansion of Root Node in Explorer
An area is an object that defines a certain place that you have associated with a
specific property. It can be a field, a city, a section in a plant, a country, or any
other physical place. You can also have areas within areas, or subareas.
An RTU is placed in an area. You can have as many RTUs in an area as you
want—limited only by the type of license you own and the remote server or
Telemetry Gateway you are downloading data from. All the RTUs in a certain
area have the common property that they belong to that area.
The RTUs have tags, which can be sensors or actuators. A tag can also result out
of the processing of other tags by an extension.
Crops act as containers for extensions (calculations or disease models) that are
specific to one crop field in one year. Crop nodes have all the required
phenological phases, irrigations, and treatments.
Calculation extensions are types of embedded software that process input tags
following certain rules and output events or other tags (virtual tags). This type
of extension can also control output tags (actuators), effectively implementing
remote control functions. Calculation extensions apply to an area rather than a
crop.
Disease models are types of embedded software that track the progress of
common diseases that are specific to a crop. They are always the children of a
crop node.
Panels are the result of saving a view. For example, if you create a Trend and
want to refer to it later (see page 31), you can save it as a panel.