1-Wire UNI Sensors Upgrade for Perseus Platform

Starting in 2025, HW group is going to upgrade all 1-Wire UNI sensors we produce. With this application note, we want to explain the change and the motivation behind it.

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In addition to improving the hardware, we wanted the new sensors to correctly align with the change in our philosophy established for the Perseus platform - each external data source acting as a single “Meter”, with one or more “Variables” available.

In the past, most of our monitoring units, whether it was Poseidon2, Damocles2, Ares 12 or any other, operated with the “Sensor Values” licenses, so all the sensors supported this line of reasoning. There was a maximum number of “Sensor Values” available for each device, not the number of connected physical or virtual data sources.

With the introduction of the Perseus platform, the “Sensor Values” and the licenses for the respective monitoring units no longer exist, because in Perseus units we only work with the “Meter”, which represents a connected data source, either a sensor, a detector, another device connected via XML, SNMP, MQTT or Modbus/RTU, and its “Variables”, similar to the former “Sensor Values”.

With all Perseus units supporting up to 100 meters and 1000 variables, we needed to find a way to capitalize on this number. With the first generation of sensors connected to a Perseus unit, you would get a separate “Meter” for each “Sensor Value”.

Because so many sensors have more than one measured value, starting with the popular combined Temperature and Humidity sensors, which are the most commonly used sensors in any environment - with such combined sensors you would have to work with two separate “Meters”, and their respective “Variables”. In the case of the 1-st generation THPVoC sensor, you would have 4 separate “Meters” in the Perseus device, in one physical box with four hardware probes.

This will change with the next generation of 1-Wire UNI sensors, which have been upgraded specifically to accommodate the change in the Perseus platform. With the new generation of 1-Wire sensors, those that have more than one measured value will be represented in the Perseus’s GUI as a single “Meter”, with multiple Variables (formerly “Sensor Values”).

This may seem like a small change, but for the HW group it is important and essential, as we want to give our users the full ability to use all the 100 Meters available to them from a hardware perspective. In addition, Perseus views Meters differently than the older monitoring devices we produced in the past, and the real work in the new Perseus units is at the Variable level. This means that this change will help Perseus users organize and manage their monitoring setups much more efficiently.

And nothing changes for the older HW group devices with the newer sensors - they are backwards compatible with everything we’ve produced in our 20-year history.