Can you use GPS tracking capabilities, in ignition perspective to tracking products through a factory setting?
The GPS functionality in Ignition Perspective is limited to the mobile client app, and provides the coordinates of the mobile device. What exactly do you mean by tracking products? Do they have their own GPS transponders?
I believe the phrase you're looking for is RTLS. GPS does not lend itself well to indoor applications.
You are correct, Jordan.
I meant RTLS is there any examples or situations where this is used with ignition?
No, but seems to me Ignition doesn't need anything other than a suitable driver or OPC connection. The BlueIOT website doesn't provide much information unless you are willing to provide spammable contact details. ):
Ultra-wideband, UWB, is used for indoor positioning often. Most smart phones have UWB chips in them nowadays. Google yielded an interesting solution from ZeroKey that has an https api available
Thank your help
You could also consider HID Bluzone if you want in-building tracking of items.
We were able to successfully set up an automatic API poll to pull the latest location data of products on the floor.
Do you have an example that you can share of a visual if it doesn't violate your company's policy, I wanted to know what it looked like?
Unfortunately I'm not able to post a visual, but we used a map component and then had an svg of the floorplan for our two buildings placed in the proper location on the map.
For location of products, we were only really tracking what area they were in(so we could narrow down where we needed to look) , so we had 'zones' (svg box/shape overlaid on floorplan) and would list number of products and if the product count was small enough we would show a list of the S/Ns. Otherwise the user would have to click on the zone for a popup with the full list of S/Ns and a search function.
We did have an idea for using the default location icon for each item but it would end up cluttering the view really quickly with any amount of items being tracked.
For history, (project was stopped before we managed to complete it) the plan was to auto generate an SVG line path with a gradient that ran through the positions logged in our DB for that S/N and then overlay that on top of the floor plan.
We were looking into hosting our own map chunks that would only be the floor plan of the selected building but we never got that far.
Were you guys using RFID to track them?
Yeah, Bluzone has a few different RFID "beacons" (inluding badges that can be used with security systems) that interface with their hardware to allow location tracking.
Any time we added an item to be tracked, we logged the RFID of the beacon and the SN of the item it was assigned to in the database, along with an assignment flag (to track assigning/unassigning).
The API does have calls to store Metadata for the beacon, and in testing we were able to stick the S/N there as well.