We’re constantly developing the ZENSIE platform with a goal in mind: bringing together information that makes a difference to growers— whether that’s making it easy for colleagues to collaborate and share their expertise, or for systems to integrate data. To keep delivering on the easy integration of data sources, we know it’s crucial to keep ZENSIE simple to use and customisable to best serve individuals and teams. Ultimately, we stick to one guiding principle: build what our community wants. Every new feature, every update within ZENSIE has come from a community request. Evolving ZENSIE to reflect the needs of growers has served us well, and we have no plans to stop. Case in point: ZENSIE’s gone multilingual.

We’re proud to be a global company— we’ve got offices on multiple continents, and deployments in over 30 countries. With an HQ in Amsterdam, and so many visionary growers in our backyard, our roots are in Dutch horticulture. It’s the agricultural sector in the Netherlands that first believed in and advised us. Dutch growers, and their experience with our tech have been instrumental to the expansion of our community. We’re always working to make ZENSIE flexible, so growers can use the platform on their own terms. That’s why we’re pleased to share that the ZENSIE interface is now available in Dutch, giving growers the option to work and share data in whichever language they’re most comfortable in. And we’re not done yet— our community can expect more language options in the future.

We know that there’s plenty of crucial information that doesn’t come from software or a sensor.

That’s where manual (input) meets digital.

With the manual input feature, we make it easy to bring data collected the low-tech way straight into the ZENSIE platform, and interact with that data alongside crop-level data, or data from a climate control system. And, as with all other data in ZENSIE, users can share, compare and collaborate with colleagues.

Creating a form template

Go to the main dropdown menu and select “manual input”.

Once you’ve selected manual input, you have two options: forms, and form templates.

First, create a template. That way you can use a form multiple times.
Click the + next to Form templates. As you fill in the information to create your form, you’ll see a preview on the right side of your screen.

Name your template and add a description.

You can then create columns by clicking on ‘add column’. In this example, we’ll create columns for spider mites, thrips, aphids, etc.

Choose an icon from the list that best fits the type of information you collect. In this case, we’ll go for the insect icon. Also, select a widget color (this is the single value widget color when added to your dashboard) and set the number of value decimals.

When you’ve finished customising, click “Create.” The template will be saved.

Templates can always be changed and customised after they’ve been created, but changes will be reflected in all forms created with an adjusted template. If you’d like to create a new form, while keeping an older template intact, we recommend creating a new template.

Creating a new form

To create a new form, click on the (+) next to forms.

Name the form and select an existing template. For example, the one you just created. If you haven’t created a template yet, click on ‘Create new template’ and go to the previous step in this documentation.

You can now select whether you want to use dates as rows or as sheets. We’ll explain this concept with an example in which we select the option ‘dates as rows’. In this case, weeks are visualized as follows:

This option is useful when you monitor the number of different kinds of insects, or the same species in different locations within the greenhouse or polytunnel. This way, each row in the sheet represents a different date and each column represents a different insect (as in the example) or a different location. When you use the same template it’s easy to compare the data.

Use the ‘date as sheet’ option when you want to sort the results by days or weeks. That way you can display different locations or projects as rows. It looks like this:

This is just an example and is not related to the set-up we’ve discussed so far.

Be sure to indicate the correct time zone. This is essential, as the observations you input will receive a time-stamp based upon the time-location, which will be needed to generate graphs.

Using manual input

You can now use a form to enter the values.

Click on ‘add sheet’ and name it.

Now click on ‘add row’.

Name the row and select the date on which you’ve entered or will enter the data. It is crucial that the date that you use matches the name you give the row (week numbers or days). Otherwise, you won’t be able to find the correct data. Fill out the values per field by clicking on it and entering the correct number.

You can always adjust the number. Just click or tap the field and change it. Once you’ve entered a row, you can simply add a new row by clicking on ‘add row’ again and follow the same steps as above.

Post comments

You can also add comments and photos to the data input. As soon as you move your mouse over a field, this icon appears:

Click the icon and type a comment, @mention people within your organization and/or add images for more context.

Visualise your data with widgets

Manual input is, just like a sensor, a data source. This means that you can use different widgets to interpret the data in an easy way. Navigate to your dashboard (or create a new one) and click on ‘add widget’ to create a new graph, for example.

When creating a graph, you can select what data you want to use. In this case you can find and select your manual input data by entering the name of your form. In our example, this is greenhouse manual input.

Select which values you want to see in the graph. In this example, we select both spider mites and thrips. The widget displays the average values of multiple sheets by default, in this case ‘location 1’ and ‘location 2’. You can display these locations as separate lines in the graph by clicking on the gray box with ‘All avg’ and select the locations you would like to see.

    
Next step is choosing the correct date interval. Click on the “period” dropdown menu and select “custom start and end date” (scroll down).

Make sure you enter the correct start date and end date (preferably as close as possible to your last data entry). Select the “interval size” (again drop-down menu) that resembles the periods you have entered the data (per week/day/hour).

Click on ‘create’ and you are done.

Notifications are a great feature that can help you stay alert while monitoring your environment.

Tags are used to group sensor checks together. You can use tags to filter your list of checks and find the ones you are looking for quicker and easier.

For example, if you have sensors placed on meeting rooms you can make a tag and group all those sensor checks. Next time you want to find all the sensors installed in meeting rooms, you just have to click the tag and filter the results.

Creating tags

To create a tag, go to the sensors page and click on “+Create tag”. Add a name for the tag and press ENTER.

Assigning tags to checks

To assign a tag to one or more checks:

Select the sensor checks you want to tag.

Click at the ADD TAGS, on the bottom and select the tag you want to add. Or add a tag in the bottom green field at once.

Read next How to filter sensors in ZENSIE?

We recommend that you give your sensors some meaningful names. To change the name, you’ll have to do the following:

1. Go to the sensors page from the sidebar
2. Click on a sensor
3. Go to the settings tab
4. Change the name of the sensor
5. Click SAVE

Did you know you can control when and how often your sensors collect data? We’ll explain both options below.

1. Monitoring Frequency

To change the frequency of the data collection, go to the Sensors view and click on a sensor. Go to Settings and Advanced Settings.

The FREQUENCY field indicates how many times within an hour, a Gateway will request data from a sensor. The default value is 60 seconds, which means data are sent every minute.

Some common frequencies you can use:

• every 5 minutes: change the frequency value to 300
• every hour: change the frequency value to 3600
• etc.

Currently, most of the sensor devices do not support monitoring frequency for less than a minute. If you try to put the frequency of such a sensor device to less than 60, you will see a warning message.

2. Scheduled Monitoring

There might be situations in which you only would like to have data from Monday to Friday, for example. To schedule this monitoring we use CRON jobs. CRON is an expression that helps you specify the times and days for collecting your data.

To create a CRON job, go to the sensors page, click on a sensor check and select the Settings tab. At the Advanced settings you will find the CRON field.

For example, if you want to collect data on weekdays (from Monday to Friday) and from 8:00 am until 17:00 then you can use the following expression:

If you are not familiar with CRON expressions you can use on online CRON converter (for example here).

At the side menu, you can filter checks using the Tags, the Locations, Type and/or Status.

For example, I want to see all the sensors from the first batch tag, located in Kwekerij Moors Asten, that are temperature sensors and are paused. As you can see, it’s easy to select each of these variables just by check marking the appropriate boxes.

Do you want to invite new users to your ZENSIE organization?

Go to your account settings – organization users – type in the email of the person you want to invite to your organization and fill in the details.

There are three roles:

• owners
• editors
• followers

Depending on the role the user has, several features (permissions) are available. For example, the owner of the organization can invite users. Editors and followers cannot invite users.

Here’s a table that let’s you understand these differences a bit better:

You can only invite new users, if you are an owner in your organization. Do you want to learn more about user roles and permissions? Read Getting to know ZENSIE.

To invite new users to your organization:

1. Click at the Account Settings link, at the side bar menu.

2. At the Users tab, click on the green plus (+) button to invite a new user.

3. Fill in the details of the new user and click INVITE.

At the export page, you can export the raw data of your organization.

You have the following options:

• Internal or external export; choose whether you would like to share the data report internally, or with someone outside of your organization like a consultant.
• Location; if you have multiple data locations, select which one you would like to extract your data from.
• Sensor Type; select the sensors of which you would like to get the data from.
• Date Selection Type; month and year, or custom date selection.
• Number decimal separator
• Month
• Year
• Aggregation Type; choose between No Aggregation, Predefined Interval Aggregation or Custom Interval Aggregation.

Now you can click START EXPORT. You will receive an email when the export is done. Go back to this page and click the link on the right side. Your export will start automatically.