ThermoSpider software Quick-start guide

December 9, 2009  Print This Post

Follow these steps to get started quickly with ThermoSpider

• Install ThermoSpider (instructions are included when you purchase ThermoSpider)
• Register ThermoSpider using your name, email address and license code (supplied after purchasing ThermoSpider)
  
• Add at least 1 Ethernet Thermometer (TME) to the probe list in the ThermoSpider preferences. (e.g. 192.168.1.254), and tick “Sample”, “Graph” and “Export”
• Open a Graphing Window (Window menu -> Graphing Window)
• Set “Poll Every” to 1 minute (Preferences -> Monitoring). This is how often your thermometer is asked for the current temperature.
• Set “Generate every” to 1 minute (Preferences -> Graphing). This is how often the graph is exported to HTML format.
• Set “Scale Time Period” to “Last hour” to begin with
• Close the Preferences window by clicking the “Save” button
• Allow ThermoSpider to accumulate data for a few minutes
  

The graphing window will be ‘empty’, until enough data has been collected. So, by setting “Poll Every” to 1 minute, data will be accumulated sooner.

Once Setup…”View in Web Browser”

Once a graph is showing in your Graphing window, you can go to Preferences -> Graphing tab, and click the “View in Web Browser” button, to start to view your graph (as a web page) in your default web browser. When viewing the file via your web browser, the page will auto-refresh periodically, checking for an updated graph image. (If a new one has been generated, it will be displayed).

You can also book-mark the ThermoSpider output page in your browser, for future reference.

Share your web page

If you want to share that page across your network, simply enable web sharing for that particular folder/path location, on your computer. (Enabling this will depend on your computer setup, e.g. whether in Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux etc.). You can also change or customize (cut / copy / paste) the default web export URL, to suit your needs.

Later, you can set these polling and generating settings, back to less-frequent intervals if you like.

Text Export (for use in Excel etc.)

Your TME data will also be exported (as text) if you have the “Export” box checked for your thermometer (in the Preferences -> Monitoring -> Export field). Check the Preferences -> Monitoring tab, for the default “Output” path. (You can also change this path yourself).

Sample, Graph, Export

In the Monitoring Preferences -> Probes list, these are the options available:

• “Sample” refers to whether you want to gather data for that probe
• “Graph” refers to whether data is graphed for you
• “Export” refers to whether your TME data is exported to text file automatically.

(It is recommended to “tick” each of these values, to enable full functionality)

Display more than one TME

If you have more than one TME, you can add additional TMEs, to the ‘Probes’ list (as noted above). Once added, give Thermospider a few minutes to ‘talk’ with the TME’s, to grab some more data. Once sufficient data has been obtained, then these additional TMEs will also be graphed, one after another (down the Thermospider window).

If you have opted to to the web ‘export’ function, each additional TME will appear after another too, down the web-browser window. An example screen-shot of the Thermospider Web-export, is shown below: