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Connected IoT Source Devices

IoT source devices are the electronics and software that are monitoring connected equipment, machines, and systems. These can be a product specifically designed for IoT, wireless sensors, gateways talking to industrial fieldbus, industrial PCs, or embedded products that send data to the IoT Platform, this platform is how data gets into the ExoSense application system.

Each unique device source is identified and managed as it's own source with it's own channels. To be used within an ExoSense solution the IoT Connector must be added to ExoSense by the administrators. Once the IoT Connector is available, all device source identities are available for assigning ownership in ExoSense and using for sourcing of Asset signals.

Managing Source Devices

Device Management users have access to the Device Management page in the ExoSense side navigation. This provides access to view device info, assign ownership in the hierarchy, troubleshoot, and in some cases configure channels and software updates.

The device overview provides the ability to see the identified source device's channels, status information, ownership group, device tags, assets using it's channels, and optionally a location and device software details.

The label and note device tags are optional, providing helpful information to be stored about this connected identity. The label is shown during asset creation to help finding and understanding what the identity is, how it is mounted or located in a physical system, building, etc. This is useful when the IoT devices are installed before the digital Assets are created in ExoSense.

Permissions

  • Device Management is a permission that is available to some user roles. With this permission, devices in the user's group hierarchy are available to view, move, manage, and create asset signal data from.
  • Users without this permission, but with Asset Management may still see and use Devices for the purpose of creating assets and signals from source device channels.
  • Device Software Package Management is a permission that grants the user role the ability to apply software packages to devices.
  • Device Software Package Administration is a permission that grants the user role the ability to create software packages.

Device Channel Data

Device send channel data as a part of a packet, some packets will have one or more channel values, some will have other channels - it's entirely up to the device on how often it sends unique channel data. This data typically represents sensor or status readings from a directly connected sensor or one over a fieldbus protocol. Channels must be defined in the device identities config_io resource. Device channels can individually be mapped to one or many Asset signals, it becomes the signal's source. The channel properties are inherited by the signals for a end to end source of truth.

Information about the device interface and schema can be found here ExoSense Device Interface & Schema Overview.

Advanced - Remote Configuration of Channels

Some devices support editing the channel config in ExoSense to be synced down to the device. In these cases, channels may be edited from this page along with the entire raw config_io file.

Device Log

A recent and live table of messages written to device resources (data_in, config_io, etc) is available for device troubleshooting.

Assigning Ownership of Devices

Devices that have been connected to an ExoSense instance must be assigned to a group for ownership purposes to restrict who may use the source data. Device channel data can only be used for this group after assignment and may not be used for Asset signals until assignment.

To assign ownership of a device, browse to the "Unclaimed Devices" and select one or more devices to assign. Next, choose the Parent Group to which these devices will be assigned, and click "Assign to Group."