Overview
VACER refers to the methods of data ingestion into CIM’s PEAK Platform without the use of an on-site data acquisition device (BACER). Blurb here about pros and cons of VACER - can be faster as there are less cyber security hoops to jump through. Main cons are related to reporting data integrity (CIM cannot dictate data intervals and therefore report missing data for a specific interval), additional time required to develop new parsers, less frequent data
The main condition for using VACER is to ensure data is generated and sent in a consistent file format. Formats can be either CSV or Excel documents. At this point, we do not accept XML, JSON or PDFs.
Walkthrough
When navigating to Site Manager > Virtual Collectors for the first time, PEAK may say that no virtual collector is found for the site. There is a Create Virtual Collector button in the top right to have PEAK automatically create the collector and begin the process detailed below.
Step 1: Create all the necessary files in the virtual collector. The following information is required for each file:
File type - This refers to the shape or pattern of the data file. Typically a file will use header rows denoting point identifiers, with a timestamp in the first column. The most common difference between each file type is the format of the date and time, so please take extra care for this field. Please see linked samples for each parser or reach out to CIM to obtain them.
File Schedule - This is for (future) reporting of missing data. Accepted schedules are daily, weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc.
File Pattern - This refers to the name of file. PEAK accepts the use of the * wildcard to replace multiple characters similar to regex, mainly to accommodate appended timestamps that occur on files. Due to the aforementioned reporting, best practice is to try and match 1 file pattern to 1 file, otherwise PEAK may believe that data points are missing from one file as they only appear in a second file.
For subsequent steps such as equipment creation and point commissioning, please refer to the common guides that are shared with BACER and VACER. The below features are unique to VACER.
Additional step: Associate files to equipment. This is done either by editing the individual equipment (pencil icon next to the equipment) or in the equipment table via the drop-down menu in the cell.
If the file is header based, transpose the header into a column to copy-paste into Commission Favourites page, utilise drag and drop etc.
A favourite-cloning feature exists for VACER as well. This can copy data mapping tables from 1 equipment to up to all equipment of the same metadata type. The feature allows for deselecting specific favourites per target equipment, for instance if the master equipment used as the template has additional points, then each target equipment can be customised with the checkboxes next to each point under the equipment. Levels and Zones are inherited from the equipment by default, however can also be overridden during the cloning process. The primary limitation is that it assumes point names are identical, so cannot be used if the identifiers include references to the equipment name or similar.
Please reach out to CIM for samples of the existing parser formats.