The primary purpose of SCS is to collect data from various sensors and log their outputs to persistent storage. Data visualization, packaging, marshaling, dissemination, QA/QC, submission and all the other functionality SCS provide are rendered pointless if no sensor data is being acquired. That being the case, it can be argued the two most important sub-systems inside SCS are CFE (covered in this section) and ACQ. CFE is responsible for defining the what and how of data acquisition, ACQ is responsible for the execution of the plan generated by CFE and the actual logging of the described data. Both applications are tightly coupled with the business rules of the database to provide consistent and quality sensor configuration while providing extensibility of the history of sensor devices over time
CFE is the location where SCS administrators can add, remove or update the suite of sensor feeds that SCS is acquiring. This is were you keep track of your physical inventory and their logical ingestion rules inside SCS. This is also where you can create custom derived data (such as converting a temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit or converting a voltage reading to a more useful scientific value).
CFE is critical to the successful setup and operation of SCS and is restricted to administrative users only. In addition it can only be operated/opened on a single workstation at a time to avoid any possibility of mis-matched sensor configurations and reduce confusion.
Interface Overview
CFE can be accessed directly from the main menu once you have logged in, assuming you have administrator rights.
The user interface consists of a primary command toolbar (A) at the top which has a variety of dropdown lists, buttons and even color indicators to help relay the state of your configuration. Below the toolbar you will find the core of the sensor configuration tooling with a tab strip and tree on the left (B) and a large editing pane on the right (C). Each of these sections is described in more detail in this guide.
Configuration States
CFE acts somewhat independently of all the other systems and clients in SCS. It can be moderately complex and in fact the majority of the database is dedicated to this application. It maintains and manages two basic configuration states:
Working Configuration: The sandbox configuration being edited and updated via CFE
Published Configuration: The Live/Production configuration being consumed and used by all active SCS subsystems and clients.
You start off with a Working Configuration, this is your sandbox to play and design in. When you add, delete and update sensors, messages, devices, etc this is all being done in the working configuration. Once you are happy with your product you Publish the Working Configuration which updates the Published Configuration to reflect your changes.
Fleet Sensor Database
The FSDB synchronization status is displayed in the CFE UI. This sync process occurs automatically at regular intervals behind the scenes via the FSDB service. However, if you wish to manually initiate a synchronization task you can click the Run button and one will immediately start.
Navigation Tab
The navigation tab (B) is your main organizational structure in CFE. There is a search box above the tree in which you can search for keywords or text throughout the configuration. A result list will appear displaying all your matches, click the button to immediately goto the element of interest in the tree.
there is a set of buttons which also allow you to automatically expand or collapse the entire tree to a certain level. By clicking the various levels (1 - completely collapsed, 5 - completely expanded) you can perform a mass visualization operation on all nodes of the tree.
You can choose to display items by their system generated names, or the user-assigned Display Names via the View Display Name checkbox located at the top of the tree.
The tree itself displays all your physical inventory, sensor interfaces, calculated interfaces and SAMOS interfaces in a logical form. Expanding any node and clicking any item will load it's data (for editing / review) in the details pane (C) on the right.