I wonder if Data Kraken is only used by German speakers who translate our hackneyed Datenkrake – is it a word like eigenvector?

Anyway, I need this animal metaphor, despite this post is not about facebook or Google. It’s about my personal Data Kraken – which is a true shapeshifter like all octopuses are. (Because they are spineless, but I don’t want to take that metaphor too far…)

Data Kraken’s shapeability is a blessing, given ongoing challenges:

When the Chief Engineer is fighting with other intimidating life-forms in our habitat, he focuses on survival first and foremost … and sometimes he forgets to inform the Chief Science Officer about fundamental changes to our landscape of sensors. Then Data Kraken has to be trained again to learn how to detect if the heat pump is on or off in a specific timeslot. Use the signal sent from control to the heat pump? Or to the brine pump? Or better use brine flow and temperature difference?

It might seem like a dull and tedious exercise to calculate ‘averages’ and other performance indicators that require only very simple arithmetics. But with the exception of room or ambient temperature most of the ‘averages’ just make sense if some condition is met, like: The heating water inlet temperature should only be calculated when the heating circuit pump is on. But the temperature of the cold water, when the same floor loops are used for cooling in summer, should not be included in this average of ‘heating water temperature’. Above all, false sensor readings, like 0, NULL or any value (like 999) a vendor chooses to indicate as an error, have to be excluded. And sometimes I rediscover eternal truths like the ratio of averages not being equal to the average of ratios.

The Chief Engineer is tinkering with new sensors all the time: In parallel to using the old & robust analog sensor for measuring the water level in the tank…

… a multitude of level sensors was evaluated …

… until finally Mr. Bubble won the casting …

… and the surface level is now measured via the pressure increasing linearly with depth. For the Big Data Department this means to add some new fields to the Kraken database, calculate new averages … and to smoothly transition from the volume of ice calculated from ruler readings to the new values.

Change is the only constant in the universe, paraphrasing Heraclitus [*]. Sensors morph in purpose: The heating circuit, formerly known (to the control unit) as the radiator circuit became a new wall heating circuit, and the radiator circuit was virtually reborn as a new circuit.

I am also guilty of adding new tentacles all the time, too, herding a zoo of meters added in 2015, each of them adding a new log file, containing data taken at different points of time in different intervals. This year I let Kraken put tentacles into the heat pump:

But the most challenging data source to integrate is the most unassuming source of logging data: The small list of the data that The Chief Engineer had recorded manually until recently (until the advent of Miss Pi CAN Sniffer and Mr Bubble). Reason: He had refused to take data at exactly 00:00:00 every single day, so learned things I never wanted to know about SQL programming languages to deal with the odd time intervals.

To be fair, the Chief Engineer has been dedicated at data recording! He never shunned true challenges, like a legendary white-out in our garden, at the time when measuring ground temperatures was not automated yet:

Long-term readers of this blog know that ‘elkement’ stands for a combination of nerd and luddite, so I try to merge a dinosaur scripting approach with real-world global AI Data Krakens’ wildest dream: I wrote scripts that create scripts that create scripts [[[…]]] that were based on a small proto-Kraken – a nice-to-use documentation database containing the history of sensors and calculations.

The mutated Kraken is able to eat all kinds of log files, including clients’ ones, and above all, it can be cloned easily.

I’ve added all the images and anecdotes to justify why an unpretentious user interface like the following is my true Christmas present to myself – ‘easily clickable’ calculated performance data for days, months, years, and heating seasons.

… and diagrams that can be changed automatically, by selecting interesting parameters and time frames:

The major overhaul of Data Kraken turned out to be prescient as a seemingly innocuous firmware upgrade just changed not only log file naming conventions and publication scheduled but also shuffled all the fields in log files. My Data Kraken has to be capable to rebuild the SQL database from scratch, based on a documentation of those ever changing fields and the raw log files.

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[*] It was hard to find the true original quote for that, as the internet is cluttered with change management coaches using that quote, and Heraclitus speaks to us only through secondary sources. But anyway, what this philosophy website says about Heraclitus applies very well to my Data Kraken:

The exact interpretation of these doctrines is controversial, as is the inference often drawn from this theory that in the world as Heraclitus conceives it contradictory propositions must be true.

In my world, I also need to deal with intriguing ambiguity!