4. Object Movement

4.1 Background

To understand this section, you need to know a few things about lab management. Usually, a lab manager is concerned about two things:

Lost assets – i.e. portable lab equipment that is not where it is supposed to be.

Alerts from lab equipment – overheating, temperature too high (or too low) in a refrigerator, etc.

He will typically have added sensors to his equipment to locate a piece of equipment (something like apple tags) and monitor the state of the unit (through sensors of various kinds). Hopara expects this information to be in an accessible form, e.g. in a database, and we copy the data to a database if it is not there already. Many sensor companies do not automatically record the floorplan of a lab. If not provided by the sensor vendor, then it is provided from some other system (often CAD drawings of the facility).

When the floorplan comes from one place and the asset definition and monitoring comes from another, there is a real possibility of inconsistency. For example:

The floorplan may be wrong

The assets may be incorrectly placed or not positioned at all.

This section shows you how to modify your visualization to correct for such problems. In all cases, any changes you make go immediately into the Hopara database for safekeeping.

4.2 Move and Place

Starting from Figure 1, zoom in on the red lab until you see the floorplan, and then click on the “move and place” button to generate the display of Figure 15.

You can see the floorplan of the first floor of the red lab, with icons for the equipment in the lab. From this screen you can move assets to their correct location if they are mispositioned. All you need do is click on an asset and drag it to its proper place. Note that the location is permanently updated in the database. There are three other button which can be selected. Now click on the asset button to generate the display of Figure 16.

Here you see a list of all assets in the enterprise. You can scroll down the list to find any asset of interest. You can also type a text string into the search bar and the list will be filtered to those assets containing the search string. Clicking on one of the matching assets will move the display to place the asset in the middle of the screen. You can then move the object at will. So far, we have searched for assets in multiple ways and can move them at will.

Notice at the right side of each asset is a colon or a diamond symbol. The colon means the asset appears in the database and has a screen position in the asset record. A diamond indicates that the asset appears in the database but does not appear on the screen. Obviously, the asset should be positioned in the lab. To do so, you can place the asset at its location by clicking on the diamond and dragging it to a position on the floorplan.

Now click on the floorplan button to see the screen of Figure 17. You will see a list of the floorplans in the various facilities. Clicking on any item will “teleport” you to the appropriate location. Figure 18 shows teleportation to floor1 of Lab 1. If you click on the “whitespace” inside the floor, the corners of the floor will be highlighted. From here, you can resize and physically move the floorplan if it is mispositioned.

In this section we have shown you how to move assets and floorplans around. With the information in this guide, you should be able to navigate around the various sample applications and edit them at will.

In the companion advanced guide, we will show you how to create an application from scratch and perform other advanced modifications to a Hopara application.