Introduction

In this How-To , you will create and set up a building floorplan under Wirepas Network Tool Client.

What you’ll learn

• How to create and import a building floorplan into WNT client
• How to georeference it
• How to configure the scale factor of your floorplan

What you’ll need

Prerequisites

This how-to assumes you already have:

• A configured and working backend either self-hosted or Wirepas hosted
• Wirepas Network Tool (WNT) Client installed and configured to connect to your backend with [1] (WNT 3.x) or [2] (WNT4)
• You went through the document [1] or [2] depending on your WNT version i.e v3.x or v4

Getting started

In this how-to you will set up a building floorplan where a Wirepas network is/will be deployed.

To achieve this setup two steps are proposed:

• Step 1: Create a building and import a plan into WNT client
• Step 2: Georeference the plan and set its scale factor

Step 1: Create a building and import a plan into WNT client

In this step you will see how to create a building and import its floorplan into Wirepas Network Tool client.

The floorplan has to be an image either in .PNG or .JPEG format of your building’s map.

Note: The building floorplan feature of the WNT client supports multiple floors. So one building’s plan per floor is needed in this case.

Once images are created and uploaded onto your computer:

1. Start WNT client and log in under your “admin” account. You will then have the following menu displayed

• Note: the exact displayed information will vary depending on your Wirepas Massive network setup.

2. Click on “settings“ menu as shown below

• On the General Settings Menu selects your preferred Measurement System between Imperial and Metric.

3. Then go to the “Building floorplans“ menu as shown below

• Note: Depending on your previous usage of the WNT client you might or might not have the yellow banner displayed. You don’t need to worry about it at this stage.

4. Create your floorplan:

• Give a name to your building setup with the “BUILDING NAME“ field. As an example, in this how-to it will be called test_building. 
• Then with a click or a drag&drop operation into the “FLOOR PLANS“ blank rectangle, upload one of your building floorplan image. The displayed menu will look like this in case of a one floor building

• It is possible to add additional floors by loading additional picture or create a new building by clicking the “Add building“ button on the top right corner.

Now that you know how to add and create new buildings and floorplans, the next step is to georeference the plan and configure its scale factor. This process is explained in the following section.

Step 2: Georeference the plan and set its scale factor

In this step you will see how to configure your floorplan(s) so that the localization feature of anchors/tags works. 

Each floorplan has to be georeferenced to be properly configured and displayed. This allows your building(s) to be located on the WNT client integrated world map to easily manage/find them but mostly in order for Wirepas Positioning Engine (WPE) to be configured based on your anchors/tags position on your floorplan. 

Here is a procedure example to georeference a floorplan(s) in the “building floorplan“ menu:

1. select your building and click on one of the available floorplan (in this how-to guide “test-building_floor00-plan“ as illustrated below

2. The configuration menu is displayed where you need to input a set of 4 GPS Coordinated (Points A,B,C,D) and one scaling factor (Points 1, 2) 

• Note: 
  • Click on the help menu (right side) for more information. 
  • You can zoom in/out the picture using the mouse scroll wheel and move around the plan by keeping the mouse’s left button pressed and moving it. 
  • You can also change the displayed floorplan opacity (to better see A,B,C,D,1,2 point for instance) thanks to the “image overlay opacity“ slide bar located in the bottom right corner. 

3. Drag and drop A,B,C,D points on the floorplan depending on your need. An example is given below

4. Next step is to get the A,B,C,D points' GPS coordinates. In the following example an explanation using Google map is provided but any other method to get GPS coordinates can be used.

• Find the building boundaries corresponding to your map area in Google map. You can use either Map or Satellite view

• You can then get access to the longitude and latitude of your mouse cursor with a simple right click on the map. Use this to find the coordinates for the point A,B,C,D of the building floorplan WNT client menu and report them accordingly in the tool. 

• Note: Points A,B,C,D don’t need a high accuracy, in most of the cases this method provides already good results.

5. once done the WNT client menu should look like this

6. Set Height: This parameter does not necessarily correspond to the real altitude but can be relative to your building setup. e.g. ground floor can be altitude 0, first floor 3m etc.
Note: Click to the help menu for a more complete explanation of this concept.

7. The final step is to place on the floorplan the points 1 and 2 which are used to calculate the plan scale factor between the provided image (pixels) and reality (GPS coordinates). The distance measure has to be more precise than A,B,C,D and can be given in metric or in imperial measurement system. A real measurement is strongly advised e.g. by local measurement.
In case an on site measurement cannot be performed, this distance can be measured on Google Map (either in Map or Satellite view) with a right click and by selecting the “measure distance“ option as shown below:

8. At this point you should have a completely configured floorplan i.e georeference and scale factor. The following screenshot gives an example of a finalized configuration:

9. finally click on the save button in the bottom right corner of the menu.

Your floorplan is now fully configured, you can proceed with additional floors or buildings with the same method.

Finally, to add nodes on your floorplan go to the Settings → Node Management menu, click the help section (screen’s right side) and follow the given instructions.

Going further

The tutorial showed how to set up a simple building floorplan with the Wirepas Network Tool client.

In case of a whole building with tens of floors or several building doing this manually is not practical. To that end the Wirepas Network Tool backend API described in [3] for WNT 3.x or [4] for WNT4 can be used.

References

[1] Wirepas Network Tool v3 Client User Guide

[2] Wirepas Network Tool v4 Client User Guide

[3] WNT v3 backend API

[4] WNT4 backend API

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