Interruption Best Practices: Virtual Brew 4/18/2024

Hear from Remote Monitoring Specialist Michael Plaster as he walks through important tips for setting up interruption on Bullhorn Web for your Bullhorn RM5 remote monitoring unit at our Virtual Brew monthly webinar.

Transcript

Introduction

Mike
Well, good morning, everybody. Today we’re going to learn about RM5 interruption and what to expect. Before I get started, I just wanted to give you a little bit of advice: if you’re ever cold in your house, just go to a corner — it’s always 90 degrees there.

All right, moving on. When setting up interruption on Bullhorn Web for the Bullhorn RM5, what you should expect is what we’re going to learn today. It’s not always intuitive, but we’re working every day to make that happen for you.

Normally, when I set up interruption, I show everybody how to do it from the All Units page — I don’t normally go to the Unit Admin page to set it up, but today that’s where we’re going to start from, because I want everybody to know there are other options. So what we’re going to do is go to the pencil for the unit, click on that, and that’ll take us to the Unit Admin page. From there, we’re going to go to the IO Module and Interruption tab, and set up our interruption settings.

Setting Up an Interruption

For this example, we’re going to use Start/Stop, our local time zone is Central, and sync on the on/off — and that’s important for this example, that we’re syncing on/off, not off/on — but we’ll get more into that later.

Next, we’re going to set up our start and stop times. Our start and stop times need to go from today into the future, and it also has a time setting, like 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — and I always want to point this out — this is for a 24-hour period, starting at midnight, going through the morning hours and into the evening, till midnight. So you cannot cross over the midnight frame with your stop interruption, because that would tell the unit it’s actually stopping before it’s starting. But in this case, we’re good at 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. We’re using three seconds on, one second off.

And for this scenario, we’re going to disable interruption verification — that’s important, because of what we want to show you in our examples — but we’ll come back later and show you what it looks like with it enabled. Now we’re going to save it, and once we’ve saved, we’re going to go up to Details, which will take us back to the detail page for this unit — and this will put us on the screen where we need to go to Outgoing Packets, and then we can see it queued up for this unit. What that means is the website has taken these settings and built them into a data packet to send to the unit — it’s queued up, but it hasn’t sent yet. It may take a few minutes — that queue is usually just a couple minutes long.

Now, once you’ve seen it go to Complete — we’re ready to look at the incoming packets shortly — but I just wanted to let you know, when it says it’s complete, that doesn’t mean it’s interrupting yet — it just means the data packet has reached the unit, and the unit has said, “Hey, I got the packet.” So now what we’re going to do is go to the Incoming Packets and see what it shows.

Now, incoming packets — this was pretty fast in this example, but it can take a little while to get this packet in, sometimes, depending on whether you’re using a cell unit or a satellite unit — it can take as long as eight minutes or longer. In this case, it says the interruption state is “on but not verified.” If you remember, early on, when we were setting up the unit, we set it to verification disabled — and what that means is the unit received the interruption packet, and the unit believes it started interruption, so it sent us a data packet saying, “Hey, everybody, we’re interrupting” — but it hasn’t verified it.

What I want to show you now is how to go about verifying that it is interrupting. What we’re going to do next is go from Incoming Packets over to Commands, in the upper left-hand corner, and then in the lower right, where it says Send Command, we’re going to select the Stop Interrupt option — this way, everything gets back to normal mode. We’re going to hit Send, and once we hit Send, we can go up to Settings in the upper left, and this will bring us back to the Unit Admin page. We’re going to go back to Interruption, and set up everything the same as we did before, except this time we’re going to turn on interruption verification.

You can see here it’s set at one — that’s the minimum it can be set to — and we’re looking for the unit to have an on reading and then drop below one volt. Now, one may not be the best choice in all cases, but we’re going to use it for this scenario. Once we’ve set it to one, we can hit Save in the lower right, then go back to Details.

[Moderator]
Hey, I got a question for you — what channel is used for interruption verification?

Mike
Well, it’s channel one. The reason I bring this up is our unit can read amps on any of the four channels, or volts on any of the four channels, but it can only verify interruption using channel one. Now, after talking to our developers, they’ve promised that — not in the next release, but in an upcoming release — we’ll have interruption verification on all channels, so you can have your amps on any of the four channels.

All right, moving back on — now that we’re on our unit detail page, we’re going to look at the queue — it’s queued up — and once again, we’re going to wait for it to send out and say Complete. Once it’s complete, we can go to the Incoming Packets tab — but remember, because verification is turned on, it’s going to take about eight minutes at least before you get the verification. The reason for this is, we know in the past, something will start interrupting, and then something will happen and it’ll stop interrupting — so we don’t want to just immediately send out, “Hey, everything’s good.” We’re going to take multiple samples — we’re going to see it go on, then below our threshold setting, which we had at one volt, and then back on again, and do that multiple times, before we send out a command to the website saying that everything is working.

[Moderator]
All right, looks like we got a question. The question is: do we have to wait eight minutes before we get notified that everything is interrupted?

Mike
When you’re set to verify interruption, your interruptor is interrupting, but the website will not know for at least eight minutes — so you can either start your survey if you see it start to interrupt out there in the field, or you’ll need to wait till you see it on the website if you’re not at that particular unit.

Reading the Verification Results

All right, moving on to the next screen — we’re going to show that we’re complete on our outgoing packet, and it’s normal — so once again, the packet got to the unit and everything says it’s good. Now, on the incoming packets, once we’ve waited that eight minutes, we’ll see on the left-hand side that it’s normal and interrupting, and then on the packet that came in, we show interruption on, interruption verified — we show our on reading of 33.9 volts, and basically zero volts for our off reading. So the unit saw it go on and off, on and off, multiple times before it sent in and said it was verified.

Now, moving on from here — what else could you see if everything is not working as it should? Unfortunately, we don’t always have a perfect scenario where everything works every time. So one of the things we could see is: check your interruption verification settings. In this case, our verification settings came back at 6.9 volts on the on, and 3.7 volts on the off. Does that mean it’s not interrupting? No — it could be interrupting, but if you remember, in our scenario, we set our minimum value to one, and here the minimum value is 3.7 — so we need to change that minimum value to be able to see this verified interruption, and we can show you that next.

All right, so we’ll go back to our Unit Admin page, go to Interruption, and here we change this minimum value from one to four. So now, when it starts to interrupt, it’ll see it drop below four and then come back above it, and then it should show verification.

Cell vs. Satellite Timing

All right — satellite works differently than the cell unit. The cell unit has got signal pretty much all the time, but our satellite unit has to wait for a satellite to come over the top of the unit and have a strong enough signal to receive a packet or send one out. So you may be waiting a little longer than eight minutes for verification, when the satellite’s not overhead. If the satellite’s overhead, it can work just as quick as the cell unit, but sometimes you may have to wait eight minutes — unfortunately, sometimes as long as twenty — depending on where the satellites are.

And I’ve got one more before we go to the next screen: why do the people in Greece hate to wake up at dawn? Well, it’s obvious — dawn is tough on Greece.

Moving on — all right, there’s something else that’s different about the satellite that you do not see on the cell unit at this time. Under the unit detail page, under Commands, there’s this Interruption Verification option — for satellite units only right now. In a later release, we’ll put this for cell as well. So, if for some reason the unit on cell doesn’t report back, you can always send an interruption verification to it — as long as interruption verification is turned on. If it’s disabled, and you send this interruption verification, it’s not going to be able to verify it, because it needs to be on, or enabled, for it to verify — and same thing for satellite.

The reason for this is, with the cell network, we can send a lot of data back and forth without having to increase a data budget for our customer, but with satellite, we’re limited in how much data we can send back and forth without having to increase fees — and we don’t want to do that. So we try to do anything we can to limit the amount of data, without hampering the customer’s end goal here. And if you’re wanting it to verify just after you’ve sent the command, you can — after you’ve sent the settings to the unit, you can come up and hit Commands and Interruption Verification, and it’ll come back and verify for you.

All right, and this is something I wanted to show you as well: when your interruption cycles are set to On/Off, you’ll see a reading that looks like an on at the top and an off at the bottom — and that bottom one may be down to zero as well. But if you’re doing Off/On, then your off reading will be at the top and your on reading will be at the bottom. So that’s just something to keep in mind — it’s another way of being able to tell how the unit is set up, without having to go into the settings, just by looking at the readings for your verification.

Q&A

[Moderator]
And, Mike, we had another comment in the chat from Deborah — she said, within those eight minutes, either the dome, satellite, or cell service — can the unit show the interruption verified, that they’re interrupting cohesively between units, to start a survey?

Mike
If you’ve got it set up for interruption verification, it’s not going to send in a packet until it’s verified — so you’ll need to wait that eight minutes there. And that’s one of the reasons some customers don’t want verification turned on, because the unit will respond back right away, saying that it started the interruption, and in most cases the unit has.

All right, what if you should see interruption verification where you get two “on” readings? That’s usually an indication that your unit has not started interruption. We’ve sent the command to the unit saying, “Hey, I want you to start interrupting right now,” but there could be a problem with the relay, the wiring, or some setup issue that’s keeping it from interrupting — so our verification comes back with two on readings, rather than an on and off.

All right, do we have any questions? Well, while we’re waiting for that — I just want to tell you about the other day, when I went into a tuxedo shop. I was walking around, and the owner kept coming up and asking if he could help me, hovering over me the whole time — I finally had to tell him to leave me alone, and he said, “Fine — suit yourself.”

All right, any questions? All right, I’ll hand it back over to y’all — and just let us know at any time if a question comes up later on. Feel free to get hold of me, and I’ll be glad to help you out.

Closing

[Moderator]
Very much appreciate everyone joining us today. Hope you have a great week. Please reach out if you have any questions — we’ve dropped links to our support site that has all the instructions on interruption, and we’ll also put links to our technical support ticketing service. So, any questions, anything we can do to help you out in the field, please let us know, and hope you have a great week. We look forward to seeing you guys at the next Virtual Brew.

Mike
Thank you, everyone — we’ll see you at the next one.