Skip to content

Plot Digitizer

A Plot Digitizer turns a curve trapped in an image into data you can compute with in Seeq.

A pump curve in a scanned PDF. A vendor performance chart in a datasheet. A compressor map photographed from a manual. The information is right there and completely unusable: you cannot compute against a picture.

Status: in rebuild. EEI's Plot Digitizer shipped and was used by a Seeq customer. It returns with the rebuilt VirtualForge Toolbox.

To digitize a plot in Seeq today, use Seeq's own Plot Digitizer add-on, available from the Add-on Manager on your Seeq home page. It digitizes an uploaded image, calibrates the axes, fits curves and sends the result to Seeq, and for getting a curve out of an image it does the job well.

Two Plot Digitizers, one history

The idea reached Seeq as a POC project: a plot digitizer built in Seeq Data Lab to solve a specific problem. EEI was asked to turn it into a supported product for a Seeq customer who needed it, and did.

Making it run inside Seeq took more than expected. It needed an interactive Python server, and hosting that as a Data Lab add-on was hard to do reliably. EEI solved it by running the server as a separate, managed service that Seeq reaches into. That worked well enough that the approach outgrew the tool: it became the seed of VirtualForge, the platform EEI now delivers its Tools and connectors on.

While that work was under way, Seeq's extensibility team built a simpler Plot Digitizer on two Seeq capabilities that were new at the time: display-pane add-ons and Data Lab Functions. It avoided the hosting problem altogether, served the customer well, and is the Plot Digitizer in Seeq's Add-on Manager today.

So there are two, and they are complementary. Seeq's gets a curve out of an image. EEI's is aimed at what happens to that curve afterwards.

Where EEI's version goes next

The customer who first used EEI's version was capturing pump curves, and what they wanted next was not a better way to trace a line. It was for every curve to live with the pump it describes, so that anyone looking at a pump in Seeq finds its curve there, trusts it, and can compute against it.

That is the direction, from a digitized image to a managed engineering reference:

Capability What it adds
Curves attached to assets A digitized curve is associated with a specific asset in the Seeq asset tree: this pump, not "a pump curve somewhere"
Metadata that travels with it Manufacturer, model, impeller size and speed, test date, source document, revision. Enough to know which curve applies, and whether it is current
Calibration Correct a manufacturer's curve against field test points or commissioning data, and record that the correction was made and when
Curves as functions Evaluate a curve at any operating point, and test whether a point falls inside a digitized region, directly in Seeq formulas. The earlier version shipped these as Seeq external calculations
A library, reused One curve per model, applied to every asset of that model, instead of the same chart digitized ten times
Enterprise integration Link the curve to the equipment record in your maintenance or ERP system, such as SAP, so it follows the asset's master data

Once a curve is a governed, computable reference attached to its asset, the questions that matter become routine:

  • Is this pump operating where it was specified to operate?
  • How far off its curve has it drifted since commissioning?
  • Is the efficiency loss real, or is the instrument wrong?

None of those needs a new analytics capability. They need the reference curve to exist, in the right place, as something computable.

These are direction, not commitments. They came from a customer who wanted them, and we would build them out with the next one who does. That is how most EEI products start; see How We Engage.

How you get it

If managing curves as engineering references is a problem you have, tell us through the Endeavor Engineering resources hub. EEI's Plot Digitizer will be launched from the VirtualForge Toolbox when the Toolbox returns.