Get started

This tutorial takes a single value from the field and carries it all the way to a screen an operator can watch. It is the shortest path that still touches every part of OnTwins, so by the end you will have seen how the pieces fit rather than just read about them.

What you will build

A project with one entity in it, fed by one real reading, shown on a published screen — the entity placed in a scene, and a widget reading its value.

That is deliberately small. The same seven steps are what you repeat at scale — a project with thousands of entities is this loop widened, not a different process. Along the way you will meet each of the four apps at the point where it earns its place.

One detail worth noticing as you go: you send the reading before you model the entity. Data can arrive and be stored before anything in the site has been described, which means field work and modelling work do not have to wait on each other.

Before you start

You need two things.

• An invitation from us. It carries the address of your OnTwins, and you set your own password when you accept it. Your organization is provisioned before the invitation goes out, so there is nothing to install or configure first. If you do not have one yet, contact customer@ontwins.com.
• A browser. That is the whole list — nothing to install, no database to prepare, no hardware to connect.

No 3D models or sensors are required either. The reading you send in step three you will send by hand.

Running OnTwins on your own servers, including on a network with no internet access at all, is fully supported — see Operate when you get there. This tutorial uses the hosted service so that nothing stands between you and the first reading.

The steps

Work through these in order. Each one ends where the next begins.

1. Sign in — open OnTwins and find your way around.
2. Create a project — set up the site you are about to model.
3. Send your first sample — register an agent and push one reading.
4. Model your first entity — describe one real thing and place it.
5. Wire and interpret the value — connect the reading to the entity and give it meaning.
6. Build and publish a scene — compose the screen and freeze it.
7. See it in the Viewer — open it the way an operator would.

When you reach the end, Next steps points you at the path that matches what you want to do next.