The utility I work for has a leased interest in a wind farm in south-east Washington State. Currently our operations teams and engineers use Process Book for their analysis and monitoring tool of choice.
With the plethora of wind farms being used today I can't help but believe that there is a easy to use, flexible, and visually appealing gauge option that can be used in Process Book to display wind direction. An option that is flexible and visually appealing is very important, as I am working to present detailed visual information to our executive team.
I have played around with the legacy DevNet active-x control WeatherVane: https://vcampus.osisoft.com/Custom/Library/Library.aspx?Path=%2fvcampus%20library%2flegacy%20devnet%20content%2fActiveX%20Controls.htm
I have also worked a bit with the solution offered in this users forum: http://community.osisoft.com/index.php?/topic/2043-wind-direction-display/?hl=wind+direction
The WeatherVane control is workable but really lacks the kind of polish that I would hope to offer our executive personnel.
The vba solution offered in this forum can be altered and layered with some graphics that make it fairly appealing, but flexibility wise it seems to lack. It appears to me that this option is anchored to a set coordinate on a page which makes putting multiple of them on one page problematic. I would also hope for the ability to provide a solution that has the arrow either pointing upwind or downwind based on input from users, management and executives.
I have thought that a possible solution would provide for a gauge that calculates center based on current location in the page and then pivots the directional arrow based on the current center of the circle and not a set x,y coordinate. I also wonder whether or not it would also be possible to dynamically size the gauge so that any directional indicator would be say 85% of the radius of the current gauge size.
If something like this is out there I certainly haven't found it, possibly my Google prowess isn't sufficient. I would love to find something that can be done easily with PB symbols and a minimum of vba. I would be very happy to have the ability to layer in a background face and just generally customize the gauge to provide accurate information in a visually appealing package. In all reality, I would really think that this would be of common enough interest that it would be an add-on developed by OSI and offered as an update to ProcessBook instead of having to be coded from scratch by customers.
I look quite forward to hearing thoughts on this topic. Thank you for your time