Setting up the Calibrator Addon

Calibrator stores almost all of its information in ARDI assets and selects assets using ARDI types - as such, you'll need to make a few types and assets as part of configuring the Calibrator addon.

New Types

You'll need to create a new Type to cover….

  • Assets that can be maintained or calibrated - we often use Maintainable
  • Assets that are calibration instruments (used to perform the calibration itself) - we suggest Calibration Instrument
  • Assets that are locations where calibrated instruments located - we suggest Site
  • Assets that are the people performing calibrations - we suggest Service Tech or something similar.

To make sure you can freely use these, we normally place them under the Classes part of the Type hierarchy (ie. you'll find Maintainable under Classes / Maintainable).

New Properties

You'll generally need to add at least the new properties below…

  • Service Status (a binary/digital property, with values like 'In Service' and 'Out Of Service', with 'In Service' being 1).
  • Comment (a text property. Contains any recent observations about the asset).
  • Range - Input (a range property)
  • Range - Output (another range property)
  • Next Calibration (a date/time property)
  • Calibration Point Count (a text property)
  • Calibration Frequency (a text property)

You may also want to consider any information you'd like to include in the calibration reports about any of the parts of the calibration. For example…

  • Model number, manufacturer and serial number
  • A short ID code for the site, to include in the calibration certificate number.
  • Calibration certificate number for the calibration instruments
  • A description of the asset service
  • Details about the service technicians training or accreditation.
  • A very brief description of the method of calibration.

If you have devices with multiple outputs or displays, you might want to also define additional ranges. For example, flowmeters may often be configured with linear displays but square-root outputs, so you would want to define different scales for each.

New Assets

You should create at least one of each of the asset types above - two of these will usually be existing assets, while two of these will probably have to be added to the system.

Setup Calibration Parameters

Assign all of the calibration parameters (ie. Range - Input, Range - Output, Calibration Point Count, Calibration Frequency, Service Status, Comment, Next Calibration Date) to one of your assets, or perhaps the Maintainable type you created earlier.

An example common configuration for a temperature sensor appears below…

PropertyValue
Range - Input0-100 Deg C
Range - Output4-20mA
Calibration Point Count5
Calibration Frequency1 Year
Service StatusIn Service
Comment
Next Calibration Date2020-01-01 10:00:00
Configure the System

Next, go to Administration | Calibration Settings.

Here you will need to select all of the types and properties you've created so far.

You can also add any of those additional properties you've set up (ie. Equipment Tag, Model Number, Manufacturer, Serial Number etc.) in the Report Options section.

This tells ARDI which additional information you'd like to include on your report, and the order that they should appear.

Complete

And you're now done.

You should be able to take your asset in and out of service, report on its condition, and go through a guided calibration sequence.