The 10-day plan for adding precision environmental data to your solution

Did you know that adding environmental data to your solution shouldn’t require quadruple expertise in hardware, firmware, metrology and software development?

If you have a resourceful and reliable software developer on your team, your product development project could be less than 2 weeks away from completion.

Here’s how.

Warning! This plan is aimed at companies that :

currently offer solutions for visualizing, analyzing, recording or creating alerts linked to the monitoring of environmental conditions
who wish to enhance their solution due to a change in standards, evolving customer needs, or for strategic development reasons in order to develop a new market
for whom data quality and time-to-market are critical decision-making criteria

About Modular Instrument Integration

For several years now, Dracal Technologie’s modular sensor solution has been an unexpected “discovery” for its manufacturing customers whose products required precision environmental data. It presented itself as a miraculous alternative to a simple but unresolved problem:

“How can we offer our customers precision environmental data without having to improvise as a metrologist and sensor manufacturer?”

If you’re not familiar with the Modular Instrument Integration (MII) solution for OEMs, this is a unique combination of 4 optimally selected features that enable the easy integration of high-quality, ready-to-use environmental data, without dependence on a third party and meeting the normative requirements of the most demanding industries.

Read this case study to better understand how these 4 characteristics orchestrate a paradigm shift in the accessibility of precision environmental data for manufacturers and OEM.

Right now, we want to share with teams for whom the need to access precision environmental data has been identified, the integration plan proposed by Dracal for your team, lasting an estimated 10 days. This will enable you to better plan the availability of your resources, as some of them, such as the marketing team, may be called upon sooner than you might have imagined!

The 10-day integration plan

Day 1

1) Determine the type of measurements (temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, etc.) and their required accuracy.

2) Identify one or more products that match your needs. How? Rapidly view our product families and compare each of their member here. If in doubt, contact sales@dracal.com, explain your needs and ask the expert for recommendations. You will get a reply in less than 24h.

3) Buy one unit of each product required, with VCP and CAL options (e.g. VCP-PTH450-CAL, VCP-RTD300-CAL, …), but without certificates to speed up delivery time (3 days instead of 13) How? Go to the product page, click on the blue “Ordering” button and add the items to your basket.

Days 2 to 6 : During transit days

4) Install DracalView on your computer. How? Download page here.
5) Locate the VCP integration example that matches your preferred language. How? Visit the page of available integration examples and locate your preferred programming language.
6) Determine where you will integrate the new data stream into your code base to make it available to your customers. How? Add an entry point and an exit point for the Dracal data stream.
7) Start identifying the modifications required in the example to adapt it to your products on the way. How? Go to the “Characteristics” tab of your product page, locate the VCP output snippet for your product and compare the type and number of data channels with those in the programming example.

Day 7 : When you receive your devices

8) Plug them in your computer and launch DracalView for quick viewing.
9) Switch to VCP mode. How? Close DracalView and follow this procedure.
10) Slightly adapt the integration example to your specific unit and run your code. How? Locate the number and type of channels available for your product and adjust the code example accordingly (follow-up of step 7) above).
11) Integrate the example with your specific requirements into your code base.

You doubt it could take just 1 day? Here is a case study that proves that Dracal sensors can be integrated in a system in no more than 20 minutes end-to-end.

Days 8 and 9

12) Test and deploy in production

Day 10 : Official launch

13) Announce your software upgrade to your customers.
14) To supply your users, you can either advertise instant compatibility with supported Dracal products and let your customers buy their equipment from Dracal, or supply them yourself with pre-stocked equipment.

One year later…

… when it’s time for the annual recalibration required by most quality systems and other international standards.

One of the moments when you reap the rewards of your choice to use a modular solution is when you realize that you have successfully avoided the recalibration trap (and your competition hasn’t!).

15) The unit can simply be removed from the system, placed in an envelope, and sent either to Dracal for recalibration management, or to another calibration laboratory of your choice thanks to the open calibration mechanism.

If your end-users have purchased a replacement instrument, they can hot-swap it without suffering any downtime.

Conclusion

Although your solution benefits from providing accurate environmental data, you don’t have to be responsible for generating it. Partnering with Dracal Technologies for data generation allows you to benefit from access to the intelligence in the data, at a cost of less than 2 weeks’ development by a software developer.

Not sure if your project will benefit from Dracal’s solution?

"*" indicates required fields