Pulse User Guide¶
Pulse is the Lab Monitors environmental monitoring platform. Wireless LoRaWAN sensors in your facility report temperature, humidity and other conditions to Pulse, which records every reading, compares it with the limits you set, and alerts the right people by email or SMS when something needs attention. Everything is organized around services: a service is one thing you care about (a fridge, an incubator, a stability chamber), fed by one or more sensor channels, with its own alarm limits and notification settings.
This guide is for people who use Pulse day to day: viewers who watch conditions, operators who respond to alarms, organization administrators who set up users, assets, devices and limits, and API users who pull alarms into other systems. It documents what Pulse does today. Where a change needs Lab Monitors, the guide says so; see Getting help.
Start here by role¶
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Everyone
Activate your account, sign in, set your timezone and notification schedule, and read the dashboard.
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Operators
Understand what an alarm means, what you are notified about, and how to acknowledge, mute or schedule downtime.
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Organization administrators and API users
Add users, assets, devices and services; set limits and notification groups; automate with the API.
Not sure what your role allows? See the Permissions matrix.
How Pulse works¶
- A sensor sends an uplink. At its uplink interval the sensor transmits a short radio message containing its readings and battery voltage. See Supported sensors and channels.
- A gateway relays it. A LoRaWAN gateway installed by Lab Monitors receives the message and forwards it to Pulse over the internet.
- Pulse records the reading. Pulse decodes the message for the device's sensor type, applies any calibration, stamps it with the time received, and stores it against the channels mapped to your services. The dashboard and service charts update within seconds.
- Pulse evaluates limits. Each reading is compared with the service's bands. A reading beyond a limit for longer than the band's sustained time becomes a WARNING or CRITICAL alarm; a service that stops reporting becomes stale. See How alarms work.
- The right people are notified. After the band's delay, Pulse emails or texts the members of the service's notification group who are within their schedule, repeats until the alarm is acknowledged or recovers, and tells them when it does. See Notifications you receive.