Buildings
Overview
Our Building Structure feature allows you to put devices into rooms and floors. You will start by creating a building and assigning an address to it. Next, you can create a number of floors and rooms. Finally, you can put your devices and networks into the created floors and rooms and assign geographic positions to these devices on a floor plan.
Positioning the devices is a great way of keeping track of your installation and of being able to quickly find your devices again. It is also a necessary prerequisite of using the Asset Tracking feature.
Setting up a Building Structure
You can use our Admin App for setting up the building structure or you can use our Portal to do the same.
Navigate to > Buildings to see a list of your buildings and to be able to create new ones.
Creating a Building
When creating a building, you can specify its name, a short description and the address. It is also a good idea to upload a nice photograph of your building. Make sure to also specify the correct timezone.
Creating a Floor
At least one floor needs to be created for the building. You must specify a name such as "Ground Floor" and optionally upload a floor plan.
If you have a floor plan, make sure to upload it. If you do not have one, you can also upload a dummy image and you can always replace it later.
It is also very helpful to enter the length of the floor plan as this will also show you helpful information when creating geofences.
Asset Tracking Information (optional)
If you want to use Asset Tracking, you must enter more information. It is important to give this information as accurate as possible as wrong information will severely impact the asset tracking performance.
The length of the floor plan must be entered as accurate as possible, the height is automatically calculated from the uploaded floor plan.
Additional settings such as the installation height are used by the Asset Tracking and provide details of the physical dimensions of the floor, its orientation and default heights for various kinds of devices. The latter is relevant especially when the stationary nodes of the tracking system are mounted to the ceiling while the assets being tracked are closer to the floor, for example.
You should also specify the height of the floor base from the ground.
If you can, you should also provide a wall map, which is a white and black image that must exactly match the dimensions of the floor plan. Walls should be solid black while passable areas should be white. This can greatly improve the accuracy of the tracking algorithm.
| After creating the floor and assigning a network to the floor, you can create a geofence and use it to measure e.g. a room in your floor plan. The calculated width and height in meter should match exactly with the dimensions of your building. |
Assigning Networks
Later on, a floor contains a number of networks and you will be able to place all your devices on a geographic position within the uploaded floor plan.
You must assign either one or multiple networks to this floor before you can start placing devices on the floor plan. A network of devices is always linked to a single floor and cannot be split across multiple floors. To assign networks, use the small edit icon next to the floor image.
You are then able to assign one or more networks to this floor.
After the networks were assigned, you can always go to the details page of the floor or the network to switch between the two.
You can now position your devices on this floor plan by going to each network where you have to use the edit button to open the bulk placement view.
For more information on placing devices, see Networks.
Creating a Room
Optionally, you can also group your devices into rooms which is helpful to show additional information to a user.
When creating a room, the geographic information is also an optional part, as you are able to assign devices to rooms by simply selecting all devices of a room as well. Having geographical information is however important for asset tracking use-cases where you want to know if an object has entered or left a room. In this case, you must specify the boundaries or your room on the floor plan.
To change the shape of a room, just simply drag and drop one of the room’s corner points on the map. While moving a corner point, its position will automatically be adjusted so that its edges are aligned with the horizontal and/or vertical axis. This auto-align function can be disabled temporarily by pressing the Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac OS X) key, to give you the full control over the position. If you want a new corner point to be added to the room, press Alt while clicking on a room’s edge. In the same way corner points can be removed from a room.
Rooms are used by a multitude of platform features to further subdivide a floor. For example in Building Automation the devices of a room may be controlled in union. One could dim the lights in a meeting room or control the heating in an open-space office. Likewise in Sensors and Smart Metering analysis and visualization may operate at the level of an entire building, an individual floor or drill-down to rooms.
Notice, it is not necessary to create a digital twin of every physical room. You merely need to specify those rooms that are required for supporting your use cases of the platform.
Creating a Zone
A zone may be set up that further subdivides a room. Zones may be useful in buildings such as factories or offices with large open areas that you want to virtually sub-divide.
A zone is always created as part of a room and again, the geographic position and boundaries are mostly useful for asset tracking use-cases. The shape of a zone can be changed in the same manner as a room. See Creating a Room for more detailed instructions.
| While you are able to create a zone that is outside of the boundaries of a room, you should not do so as it might lead to unexpected behavior. |
There are a number of use-cases where you might want to have an area that spans across multiple rooms, this is not what zones are intended for. The functionality that should be used in this case are our Geofences.