Red Lion Datalogging

[jonb42]

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to software / utility to view trends (graphed data) from .CSV files, in specific those recorded by the Red Lion HMIs. This is once the logs are saved to a desktop computer - not when they are still on the HMI (where I could of course use the trend viewer primitive built in).

thanks for any help!
Jon

 

[gclshortt]

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Import-or-export-text-txt-or-csv-files-5250ac4c-663c-47ce-937b-339e391393ba

If you have excel you can use it to view the trends that you have stored.

Regards,

 

[jonb42]

I've tried excel and am not happy with the results. For instance IMO a good trend check viewer should allow a mouse click to place a vertical line which would show values for all the line curves at the point they intersect that line which is of course a specific time.

Also being able to zoom in and out of the graph to look at more detail is essential.

On top of this excel can't plot all the lines i wish for at the same time.

I've used trend viewers that are built in to hmis, physical or web view, and many have these features.

What I'm looking for is the same functionality on a desktop computer with a "dead" csv (ie not live). This is essential for checking into old data, seeing how it compares with current etc....

I figured there must be a product out there but after much searching I'm close to giving up.

Thanks
Jon

 

[OkiePC]

A quick search lead me to this online tool which looks promising. I dumped a csv file into it from a Red Lion HMI and was able to get some results with a couple of clicks...

https://plot.ly/create/

 

[jonb42]

Yes, I've tried that without the kind of results I'm looking for. It stumbles on the large datasets I have and doesn't display multiple data lines properly etc.

Also tried DataViewer and a bunch of other ones. Dygraphs looks promising but I'm not much of a javascript programmer, it needs some effort to get it to a workable state for what I want.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by the excellent trend viewer built into the MyScada software - it serves a web page which can handle large amounts of data without bogging down. However it doesn't support loading third party .CSV data. Maybe what I'm looking for doesn't exist...

thanks
Jon

 

[jonb42]

The best one I've found so far is LiveGraph which handles the qty of data I have just fine and the multiple lines, plus allowing a mouse hover to read a specific data value off the graph.

However it doesn't natively understand the date and time columns from the Red Lion datalogs - to get time to display properly I need to convert those two columns into a seconds column which is difficult to do meaningfully. Of course date and time are very important when it comes to interpreting data logs!

- Jon