Message Manager
Message Manager was developed as a tool to help decode equipment communicating on the RS485 bus. It inspects the messages in real time coming from the RS485 connection in njsPC. All messages that are being sent or received on the bus will be displayed by Message Manager.
Message Manager is installed by default with the dashPanel distribution and can be accessed by opening a browser and navigating to http://<ip of dashPanel>:5150/messageManager.html. The url is case sensitive so use the casing shown above.
When the Message Manager is first opened it will show you a display for viewing and sending messages on the RS485 bus.
The Message Manager screen is layout is sectional meaning that each portion of the screen is used to display and operate different functions of Message Manager.
The Message List is used to show incoming and outgoing messages decoded from the RS485 bus. At the top right of the message list is a header that can be used to refine and manage what is currently displayed in the list.
From left to right the icon functions are as follows
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Upload an existing packet log file. This will allow you to view a packet log file that was generated by njsPC. Simply click the icon then select the file for upload. When you press ok Message Manager will read in the raw file and display it in the message list.
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Clear Messages You can clear the currently displayed messages by clicking this icon.
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Show or Hide messages that are the same. There is a lot of potential noise on the RS485 bus and very often messages are repeated on a periodic basis. By selecting this toggle function, Message Manager will filter out all messages that are repeated. This way you can view messages only when a change to the message is made.
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Pin Selection By default Message Manager will select each message as it appears in the list. This is helpful when you want to watch the Message Details pane for incoming message data. When the pin selection toggle is selected it will not select each message will not change the selection until the mouse is clicked on the messsage.
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Start/Stop Log You can start and stop receiving live messages on the bus by clicking the Start/Stop Log icon. When the icon is highlighted any messages on the bus are reflected in the list in real time.
Whenever a message is selected on the Message List the message details pane is filled in and displayed in a format that facilitates understanding the information within it.
For instance the message above describes an inbound message that came from the second IntelliFlo VS pump on the bus to the OCP. A source address of 97 to a destination address of 16. Messages on the RS485 pump protocol use an action byte to distinguish what the payload bytes mean. In this case it is action 7 which reflects the status of the pump. The payload bytes are represented in the lower portion of this display. Using the example above, the byte at index 4 and 14 have changed since the previous message and are highlighted in blue. Payload bytes that are highlighted in blue show which bytes of the payload have changed.
If you click on any of the bytes in the payload it will show you details regarding the byte. As you can see in the screenshot below the previous value was 59 for this byte. The decimal, ascii, hex, and binary representation of the byte is displayed as well. Because we have previously observed the data in this message and have decoded it, we already know what this byte represents. It is part of two bytes that represent the number of watts being used by the pump. A common encoding for integer values uses the previous byte * 256 + trailing byte. So in this case we have (4 * 256) + 60 = 1,084 watts.
As mentioned earlier there can be large numbers of messages on the RS485 bus. Message Manager will allow you to filter live messages by their broad category. To do this click the hamburger menu at the upper right hand corner of the display. Then navigate to the logging tab.
On this tab we are interested in the Packets section. If no options in this section are enabled then no messages will be displayed in live view. As changes are made on this display, new incoming messages will be filtered in the message list. If an option has additional filtering options you can click on the filter icon located on that option button.
NOTE: In addition to the Start/Stop log toggle on the Message List header, you must have the Packets option selected in the Logging tab as well as one or more include items selected to see messages feeding to the Message List. The Log To options have no effect on Message Manager.