It was that time again.

The Chief Engineer had rebuilt the technical room from scratch. Each piece of heavy equipment had a new place, each pipe and wire was reborn in a new incarnation (German stories here.)

The control system was turned upset down as well, and thus the Data Kraken was looking at its entangled tentacles, utterly confused. The fabric of spacetime was broken again – the Kraken was painfully reminded of its last mutation in 2016.

Back then a firmware update had changed the structure of log files exported by Winsol. Now these changes were home-made. Sensors have been added. Sensor values have been added to the logging setup. Known values are written to different places in the log file. The log has more columns. The electrical input power of the heat pump has now a positive value, finally. Energy meters have been reset during the rebuild. More than once. And on and on.

But Data Kraken had provided for such disruptions! In a classical end-of-calendar-year death march project its software architecture had been overturned 2016. Here is a highly illustrative ‘executive level’ diagram:

The powerful SQL Server Kraken got a little companion – the Proto Kraken. Proto Kraken proudly runs on Microsoft Access. It comprises the blueprint of Big Kraken – its DNA: a documentation of all measured values, and their eternal history: When was the sensor installed, at which position in the log file do you find its values from day X to day Y, when was it retired, do the values need corrections …

A Powershell-powered tentacle crafts the Big Kraken from this proto version. It’s like scientists growing a mammoth from fossils: The database can be rebuilt from the original log files, no matter how the file structure mutates over time.

A different tentacle embraces the actual functions needed for data analysis – which is Data Kraken’s true calling. Kraken consolidates data from different loggers, and it has to do more than just calculating max / min / totals / averages. For example, the calculation of the heat pump’s performance factor had to mutate over time. Originally energy values had been read off manually from displays, but then the related meters were automated. Different tentacles need to reach out into different tables at different points of time.

Most ‘averages’ only make sense under certain conditions: The temperature at different points in the brine circuits should only contribute to an average temperature when the brine circulation pump is active. If you calculate the performance factor from heat source and target temperature (using a fit function), only time intervals may contribute when the heat pump did actually run.

I live in fear of Kraken’s artificial intelligence – will it ever gain consciousness? Will I wake up once in a science fiction dystopia? Fortunately, there is one remaining stumbling block: We have not yet fully automated genetic engineering. How could that ever work? A robot or a drone trying to follow the Chief Engineer’s tinkering with sensor wiring … and converting this video stream into standardized change alerts sent to Data Kraken?

After several paragraphs laden with silly metaphors, I finally come to the actual metaphor in the title of this post. The

Color Box

Once you came up with a code name for your project, you cannot get it out of your head. That also happened to the Color Box (Farbenkastl).

Here, tacky tasteless multi-colored things are called a color box. Clothes and interior design for example. Or the mixture of political parties in parliament. That’s probably rather boring, but the Austrian-German term Farbenkastl has a colorful history: It had been used in times of the monarchy to mock the overly complex system of color codes applied to the uniforms of the military.

What a metaphor for a truly imperial tool: As a precursor to the precursor to the Kraken Database … I use the Color Box! Brought to me by Microsoft Excel! I can combine my artistic streak, coloring categories of sensors and their mutations. Excel formulas spawn SQL code.

The antediluvian 2016 color box was boring:

But trying to display the 2018 color box I am hitting the limit of Excel’s zooming abilities:

I am now waiting now for the usual surprise nomination for an Science & Arts award. In the meantime, my Kraken enjoys its new toys. Again, the metaphoric power of this ‘kraken’ video of an octopus playing with PVC pipes is lost in translation as in German ‘Krake’ means octopus. We are still working at automating PVC piping via the Data Kraken, using 3D printing!