Quick Start

This chapter takes you on a tour to quickly get acquainted with the WICE Portal to see how it works.

As the WICE Portal is a web based tool there is no need to install any software on your computer.
All you need is a web browser, such as Firefox, which has Javascript enabled. With the tool you can see which assignments are running in which car, their status, get result files from tasks and much more. In this quick start you will first be introduced to the basic model of how it is supposed to work. Secondly, a simple scenario will show how a task you have created is sent to a car and started. When that task has generated data for you, download that data to your computer for further analysis.

Basic Conceptual Model

To introduce to the concept of how it is supposed to work, see illustration 1 below. There are three parts involved here:

1. You the user
2. The WICE Portal
3. A set of cars.

The user decides to add a task to a specific car when logged in into the portal. Each time the ignition is turned off the car contacts the portal to see if there is a new task to download and upload any result files to the portal. When the user later logs in he/she can see that the new task is running in the car as well as see that there are new result files for the task. This is the basic model of how it works and what you can do. Next we will go through a scenario showing screen shots from the tool and updates on where we are in the conceptual model just shown. To be precise, each car is configured with a Wireless Communication Unit (WCU) which handles the communication between the car and the portal. In reality, this is the device you “talk” to through the portal.

Terminology

In order to bring some order to everything, the terminology used will be discussed in this section. It is important that you understand the distinctions not to get confused when using the portal. Basically, on the top level there is a task. A task has a single user attached to it, which is the user that created the task and this cannot be changed. Also, each task is associated with only one assignment of each type (MCD-Hub, IDC, Canrecorder, SOH, SignalReader). However, a task can be associated with any number of WCUs. A WCU (Wireless Communication Unit) is the actual hardware that is installed into each car. The rationale behind this is that each WCU runs the same assignment for a task. Fortunately, each WCU running an assignment can be manipulated individually. This is quite natural as the progression for the assignment depends on each WCU or car.
If you find this confusing, try Illustration 2 below.

In the middle is the task which is the connecting entity. Below are the set if different assignment programs available. To the left there is a set of WCUs where the assignment program is downloaded to each WCU. The progression of the assignment program is probably different for each WCU and are therefore treated individually.

A Simple Scenario

Assume that you have a task you would like to be run in a car to collect interesting data to analyze. This scenario shows just this. The steps are:

Illustration 3: Login screen.

1. Log on to the WICE Portal
2. Add a new assignment to a car
3. Log out of the portal
4. Log in again and see how the assignment is doing
5. Download result data generated from the assignment

When surfing to the portal you will see the screen in Illustration 3. It is a simple screen with the possibility to enter a user name and password. Press the login button or enter to log in. If you have not yet received a user name and password, contact your local WICE portal administrator or responsible contact to get a user name and password.

If turned on, you may have to enter a one time password when logging in. This enhances the security by providing something called two-factor authentication. The one time password is typically generated from an app in your smart phone. There is also a program for a desktop computer to generate the one time password. For Android, iPhone and Blackberry you can download an app called “Google Authenticator” to generate these one time passwords for you. An internet connection is not needed in order to generate the passwords. To log in to an account you need to enter your login, ordinary password and the current 6 digits generated by the app. A new 6 digit number is generated each 30 seconds. To simplify logins from the same computer, typically the one at work, you can tick the check box “Remember me”. If you tick this before you hit the login button when using the one time password, you will be remembered by the portal for the next 30 days. The next time you login from the computer you only have to enter your password. When the 30 days have passed you will once again have to enter a one time password to login.

In the next screen you are presented with your tasks, their status and more, see Illustration 4. For an elaborate explanation of the information presented, turn to chapter 3.2.2 on page 17. Press the “New Task” button to transfer a new task to the car. The car will try to start the new task the next time it connects to the portal.

Illustration 4: The screen showing a user's tasks.

When pressing the button the “New Task” dialog will be shown as depicted in Illustration 5. There are five tabs in this dialog which are “MCD-Hub”, “Canrecorder”, “IDC”, “SoH” and “SignalReader”. Illustration 5 deals with the MCD-Hub tab. The tab is composed of four different areas basically, with some differences depending on the type of the assignment. Those are:

Illustration 5: The New Task dialog.

1. Choose which MCD-Hub assignment file. Press the button “Bläddra”/”Browse” to bring up the file selection dialog.
2. Choose which formats to convert to when result files are uploaded to the portal from a WCU.
3. Write a descriptive text for the assignment. This is optional.
4. To select which WCUs should receive the assignment, write the name of the WCU in the box above the “unselected resource” column text. When you type, the WCUs matching your text will automatically appear in the table. To select a WCU drag it from the unselected table to the selected table or press the right arrow between the two tables. To deselect a WCU, simply do the opposite.

You can also select to be notified of events from the WCU by checking the box about emails. If you have not entered an email address already you will get the opportunity to do so when pressing the “Ok”-button. If you change your mind and do not want to transfer any hub assignment, press “Cancel” or press the escape key on your keyboard. Before sending the request to the portal, the entries are validated. If you have not chosen any WCUs you will gently be informed that you must. If there is no email address registered you will get the opportunity to enter one. If every check went fine and the transfer went well, a pop-up showing the message “Transfer ok!” will be presented. If something went wrong the same pop-up will instead show you the error cause.

Illustration 6: Starting a new task for the canrecorder.

If you instead choose the tab “Can-recorder” the following view will show. The new settings for a canrecorder task, compared to an MCD-Hub task, are:

1. Use CAN frame pass-through filter. This is an option you can turn on or off.
2. Specify which CAN buses you are interested in recording from.
3. Enter CAN frame ID. If the above option is turned on you select the Ids of the CAN frames you are interested in. Hit the enter keyboard button or the “Add” button to add the Id. If you would like to remove an Id, press the “Remove” button next to the Id in the table below the entry of Ids.
4. Pre-trigger time. This option sets the pre-trigger time in seconds.
5. Recording time. The option is used to control how many seconds of recording should be carried out.

The “ok” button will be clickable when you have selected a validated set of options. If this is not the case, hover the mouse over the “Cancel” button to find out what must be done in order for the task to be accepted.

The third tab deals with the Internal Diagnostic Client (IDC). There is no difference between this tab and the MCD-Hub tab except that the type of assignment file is usually ending with “.seq”.

The fourth tab is for State of Health assignments. With this kind of assignment you can, currently, make four different read-outs. Mileage, ask the car to report how many kilometers it has run. Battery voltage, ask for the current voltage. Read all ECU software numbers in a vehicle and lastly you can read all error codes set by any ECU. To add a GDS file to a vehicle, seeThe_Portal_Administrator_View#The_Edit_Car_Dialog. The tab can be found in Illustration 7.

Illustration 7: An SoH assignment.

The fifth, and last, tab is the Signal Reader tab. It takes a haf file as input, an all text version of a hub file and performs the same kind of measurements as the MCD-Hub. However, using the signal reader there is also an opportunity the monitor a set of signals in real time. To accomplish this you first select a haf file and then you press the button “Monitor signals”. This adds a new graphical element where you can select which signals should be monitored in real time by dragging the name from the left container to the right container, see Illustration 8 below. When you are done you press the OK button. The monitored signals can later be viewed through the vehicles tab (Vehicles#Show_the_WCU_Position) and pressing the “Show Position” button.

In Illustration 4 you see a column labeled “Tasks”. Select your newly created task by clicking on it. The moment you select a task the corresponding WCUs are fetched from the portal and shown as tabs to the right of the “Tasks” column. An example is in Illustration 9. As you can see there is some information presented for you as well as a number of buttons for each WCU. We start by explaining the fields below the buttons From the top they are:

Illustration 8: Signal reader assignment.