Vicki external temperature control
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This is useful for large spaces where you want to control the temperature from a central location, or the radiator is covered which limits heating so the perceived temperature in the room is different than the measured from the Vicki (it would be colder in the room).
Vicki has the capability to base its behavior on external temperature readings from another device (another Vicki or a Wireless thermostat for example) and ignore its own readings.
Additionally, you can choose to control one or more Vickis externally via a Wireless Thermostat, letting you have a centralized control point. You can set the Target temperature and any Vicki associated with the Wireless Thermostat would have the same target temperature.
Let us set up both options starting with the External Temperature measurement.
Open up the Vicki from the Devices section in your Main Building Dashboard and go to the Control Section. At the bottom of the page is the Advanced section, which you need to expand by pressing on the arrow on the right of the page.
Once the Advanced control section opens up you can navigate to the Operation mode part and adjust it. There are 3 modes:
Manual (Vicki makes no decisions on its own and awaits commands from the server in order to open/close the valve)
Automatic (default) - Vicki relies on its own internal temperature measurements to adjust the valve opening in order to reach the Target Temperature
Automatic with ext. temp sensor - Vicki runs its internal algorithm, however it relies on external temperature measurement sent to it via the Server (Enterprise), which is obtained from another sensor (another Vicki or a Wireless Thermostat for example).
Change the mode to Automatic with ext. temp sensor, this will open up another drop-down menu to select the device that will be doing the measurement instead of Vicki. Once you select press on the "Send" button and Enterprise will configure Vicki to rely on the external temperature readings.
When the settings are updated after the next Vicki keep-alive you will see an indicator showing that external measurements are utilized, where the device ID providing the data will also be listed. This way you can easily look up which devices are connected in this way.
In this case you can see in the Monitor tab that the Measured temperature and Humidity data is provided from the Wireless Thermostat (indicated by the blue link icons).
Check out the video below in case you find it difficult to navigate to the aforementioned menu.
This differs from the previous setting as you need to configure the Wireless Thermostat we are using for the example rather the Vicki itself it will be controlling.
Open up the Wireless Thermostat page and navigate to the Advanced control section the same way you just did with Vicki.
There us a section called "Thermostat devices" with a table that has 2 columns (it is at the end, right before the General settings section). Moving a device from the left column to the right one (select via the checkbox and use the arrow) assigns it to this particular Wireless Thermostat for control.
In this example we have moved the Vicki to the right, so its Target temperature will from now on be controlled by this particular Wireless Thermostat. If you change the Target temperature of the Wireless Thermostat you will change the one of the Vicki too.
If you go back to the Vicki device page now you would see an image similar to the one below, where you have two colored labels below the device name.
The purple one on the left shows what device is providing the Target temperature (control) and the blue one on the right shows where the Measured temperature reading is coming from. You can also see this marked with the value of the Temperature and Humidity themselves.
