Hi everyone,
I'm currently developing an uptime and downtime monitoring tool for operators at our biogas facility using Ignition and Canary Labs. The goal is to provide an intuitive interface that empowers operators to manage equipment effectively, track downtime reasons, and improve overall facility performance.
So far, I’ve considered features like:
- Real-time Equipment Status Tracking: Visualizing operational data to highlight which equipment is running or down.
- Downtime Reason Logging: A simple interface for operators to log and categorize downtime events with timestamps.
- Historical Trends & Analysis: Integrating Canary Labs data to analyze patterns in uptime and downtime for optimization.
- Alerts & Notifications: Automated alerts for prolonged downtimes or when uptime thresholds are not met.
If you've worked on something similar, I’d love to hear your suggestions or see examples of what you’ve built! Specifically:
- Have you built something similar, and if so, what features worked well for your team?
- Are there any unique visualizations or reports that you’d recommend?
- Tips for integrating Ignition and Canary Labs effectively?
If possible, please share screenshots or mockups of similar tools you’ve created to help inspire the design and functionality.
Looking forward to hearing your insights and ideas! Thanks in advance for your help.
It sounds like you're describing an Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) type project - all the features you mentioned are typical OEE features.
This doesn't help you, besides now being able to [hopefully, better] search Google for inspiration and other potential features.
Hmm, have you ever heard of Sepasoft ?
I've linked you to a specific module for OEE downtime, but they produced a whole range of modules in order to compute MES related stuff.
If you're really keen on working on Uptime/Downtime, you might wanna have a look at what they already do.
Sounds like you're just getting started with Ignition and Canary Labs and maybe your first project in this realm? While I have a little experience in RNG, what I do know is that they don't have huge budgets typically since the quantity of gas produced is small compared to midstream gas companies (for example the RNG facility I just left will run about 2 MMSCFD vs a typical midstream cryo facility in West TX will run 250-300 MMSCFD). I bring this up as Canary isn't cheap, and if you're just looking for trends, reports, etc, Ignition will handle what you're looking for just fine. Same goes with the OEE side in that if you just need a simple way to enter into a database a reason for downtime, you don't need a full OEE suite that can also get expensive.
The RNG facility I just left (processing landfill gas) wasn't doing anything extensive like this and was only doing a couple reports. One was an emissions report to track inlet, flare, and pipeline flows with GC data in 15 minute increments for the day that exported to Excel, and the other was similar but was a monthly report showing the totals for flows, uptime, GC data, etc for each day with a total for the month that was sent every day as well with the previous day added to the end of the report in PDF format.
I'd share these, but I don't have permission from the client to share what these look like, but that's about the extent of what they did. The real-time equipment status, and alerts and notifications can all be done natively with Ignition very easily. The others can be done with Igntion and really depend on how in-depth you want to go if you really need a 3rd party package or not to do them.
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