Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #9

Jack 

Today's Alpha Tracker webinar is primarily focused on Alpha Draw and I'm joined by Dan. 

Dan 

Hiya everyone.

Jack 

And Kim, who's just next to me, who's our Alpha Tracker specialist. 

Kim 

Hello. 

Jack 

I'll be handing over to Kim today. She'll be leading the webinar and she'll be taking us through what will be covered in today's session. 

Kim 

Hi, thank you for joining us. Yes, I'm going to be going through the Alpha Draw app and showing you how easy it is to use and how easy it is to use in combination with Tracker Mobile. So using both of them together. 

Kim 

And it's really quick to switch between the two and get your drawing done. I'll show you how to do a simple drawing. And then we'll add some samples to our drawing and synchronize the project. So we'll be sending data into Alpha Tracker and then we'll be colour coding the samples in Alpha Tracker according to the results. 

Jack 

Great. Thanks, Kim. So I'm going to switch over to Kim's device now. So just bear with me a moment everyone. There we go. So hopefully everyone can see Kim's screen from the tablet. Dan, can you just... 

Dan 

Yeah, I can see it all okay here, Jack. 

Kim 

Lovely, thank you, thank you. Right, what I'm going to be doing is showing you how, if we're on Tracker Mobile, we're capturing some data in Tracker Mobile. Perhaps we're looking at our first session here, recording a session and recording a sample. 

Kim 

This one's sample one. Get all the details in there and then I want to prepare my drawing. So, what I can do is I can switch over and open up Alpha Draw. So, it's nice and quick to just open it up and then I can search for, or I can just find, if I know where it is, I've got to search up at the top there, but I know mine's here, this 57733. 

Kim 

Open up my project here. Okay, so I'm looking at the definitions here. This is for the floors for this project. I haven't got any here, I need to add a floor. So, this drawing I'm doing, I'm going to record a ground floor. 

Kim 

There's my ground, select that and it opens up the drawing page of Alpha Draw. So, this is where it's good to have your device in landscape mode. It's nice and easy to handle things then and I'm going to do my drawing on here. 

Kim 

Perhaps I just want to draw my room. Let's give it my floor plan. There we go, nice simple floor plan. I can add extra bits on here. Let's make this one. That's just two rooms. I'm going to go through a few of these features. 

Kim 

I've got lots of different shapes there on the rooms. I'm going to drag different shapes in there. I'll stick with a couple of simple ones. I can add extra features. Let's put some stairs in over here. 

Kim 

I've also got some furniture I can add if I wanted to put that in. Let's show what the room layout's like. Just a question of tapping on the little icon there and dragging it onto the plan. Got some furniture on. 

Kim 

I've also got doors. I can just drag these on as well. Let's have a couple of doors on. Okay, it doesn't matter where I put it. I can move it anywhere along. I've got arrows. I could move some arrows around. 

Kim 

Perhaps I want to put a label on. Lots of little arrows you can use, red ones, black ones. The important bit is my tags. Say this is what my room was supposed to look like and I want to put that sample one on there. 

Kim 

I will simply drag a tag onto the drawing, select the approach, what it was a sample, and give it the sample number before the first sample one. There we are. There's my sample one. Then I can simply flick back to Tracker Mobile. 

Kim 

Now I've got an MDS button at the bottom of this screen so I can just tap that and it takes me straight back to where I was in Tracker Mobile. Finish off that session. There it is. Perhaps I'm doing my second one. 

Kim 

Obviously, I've prepared these sessions in advance so that we don't go through capturing data, but you've got the idea. This is my second session. Here's my sample. So it's got the approach of S and it's sample number two. 

Kim 

Okay, do all my scoring, take my photographs, flick back to Alpha for all. There it is, nice and easy, and I can put on my second sample. Just drag that sample tag onto the page and label it. So this one is also a sample and I want to put sample number two. 

Kim 

Okay, so I'm just going to switch back again. Let's get the third one on there. So we're going to tap the MDS button at the bottom here to switch me back. Finish that session. There's my third one. I'll open my third session here. 

Kim 

For this one, it happens to be the same here. There's my sample number, sample number three, fab. Switch back. Let's put my sample on the page. There we go, three nice samples on my page and a couple of features. 

Kim 

I mean, obviously you can pick these things up, you can move them around, you can rotate them, you can do all sorts of different things with your drawings, but I'm just showing you quickly how you can just lay things out and get a drawing in onto the page here. 

Kim 

Okay, so that's my three that are on there. So what I would be doing next is in in Tracker Mobile, I would be marking everything to send and I'd be synchronizing that data, all finished. If my drawing's all finished, what I'll be doing here is saving it. 

Kim 

So there's a Save button up at the top there, but a few other controls as well, things that will help you make your drawing nice and smart. Then I'll be going back, which takes me to the floors. Here I could perhaps start doing another floor if I needed to, but here I'm gonna go back again to the list, to the menu, and then I'm going to upload my data. 

Kim 

So that uploading data is the bit where it all goes from Alpha Draw into your project on Alpha Tracker. There we are, three records submitted successfully. So if I now switch back, so we're gonna switch back here. 

Kim 

Just try and make Jack the presenter again. 

Dan 

Just while you're switching over, Kim, so when that goes back into Alpha Tracker, is that then shown in the project folder as a drawing or as a JPEG or something like that, is it? 

Kim 

Well, we're going to go through seeing what it actually looks like in Alpha Tracker, and I'll show you how you can amend the drawing, as well as how you've got a file there. There's quite a few different bits there. 

Jack 

So hopefully you can all see my screen again. Dan, can you just confirm not to confirm? All, okay? 

Dan 

I can see that fine, Jack. Yep. 

Jack 

Brill, thanks very much. So I'll just hand back over to Kim just to go through the Alpha Drawer and the desktop side. 

Kim 

Okay, so let's think. We've got a project, we've sent the data in, and we sent the drawing in. We're probably not actually going to work on the drawing much more, perhaps not at the moment. I think the first thing you would do here is to get your lab results in. 

Kim 

So let's say we were using an external lab. We would put in our project number, search for it, load up our results, or load up the samples from our survey. And then with the results that we perceive from the lab, we'll put in the identifications. 

Kim 

So let's just randomly set some. I'll have a bit of a mixture going on there. Okay, and then I'll save those results. Of course, you could be putting your results in on the five analysis screens if you've got your own lab, but that's quickly getting some results in. 

Kim 

Then if we went to the project itself, well, I don't need to get to the project, but we can go straight into Alpha Draw, then to look at our drawing, and to colour code those results. A few ways we could do it. 

Kim 

We could have done it straight from the lab results screen. We've got a button to open Alpha Draw. We could be going from the project, where we've got an Alpha Draw button here. And we could also be going from survey details, a couple of places here. 

Kim 

On survey complete, we've got an open Alpha Draw button here, and back to where we originally had it in the very first place. Back in the old days, we've got it just here on open Alpha Draw. So we've got it in lots of different places. 

Kim 

It depends on how you're working, where you want to use it, where you want to access it. You click on the button, and it will open up Alpha Draw for you. Obviously you've done it, you've selected the project already. 

Kim 

So this looks almost the same as using it on the app, but you've just got the one project. There's the ground floor, click on it, you can see your drawing. Now from here, you could amend anything. You've got all the same features that you had on the app. 

Kim 

You can put in some extra doors, you can put in some arrows, tags, whatever you need to do. And then the idea is to click the view survey data. It will list for you the results. So here are my three samples with the results that I put in. 

Kim 

And all I need to do here is to click auto colour code, and it will colour code them and save my drawing. You can already see behind the message that we've got some colour coding going on. We've got a green here for the MAD sample, and we've got reds for my two positives. 

Kim 

Okay, so that's all good. We can take that back, or we can close the tab actually, we don't need to do much more with that. That's it, we're back there. We're on the project. And now if I do answer your question, Dan, in the folder, if we go to the drawings folder, you'll see you've got plans and drawings, and you've got, this is the ground floor drawing that we did. 

Kim 

It's in there as a PNG file. So if you like, you can pull that into your survey templates, into your reports. Okay, that's pretty much everything that we've got on there. So any questions that we have? 

Dan 

Yeah, we've got a couple of questions. We've got one from Aaron. Hey, Aaron, thanks for joining. Aaron's saying, can you pull in existing floor plans and then annotate them? And then also, can you draw the extent of a suspected ACM and link them to the samples? 

Jack 

So in terms of putting an existing drawing, yes, you can. Back in Alpha Draw, there's a Load Drawings button. And that will pull in any drawings that have already been uploaded to the drawing folder. 

Jack 

And then that will allow you to draw over the top of those pre-existing images already. 

Kim 

Yeah, so that would typically typically be if your client has sent you the plan to load that in, you've got it as an image file and you can load it in and then you can just annotate it when you're surveying. 

Jack 

That's it. In terms of the extent, you can add labels in where that could be recorded, but we might need to just discuss that in a bit more detail, Aaron, just to get a better understanding of what you mean by that. 

Jack 

So we might just need to discuss that with you off webinar, if that's okay. 

Kim 

You could use those room shapes to sort of draw an area which doesn't have to have an outline and it could be hatched, you can fill it in in different ways, so there are quite a few ways to show a sort of extent. 

Dan 

Great, thanks Jack, thanks Kim and thanks Aaron for your question. We've got another one here, it's saying is the app free to install and where can we download it from? 

Jack 

Yep, so the apps completely free. If you just type in Alpha Draw to the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, it will pop up and you can just install it there just like any other app. 

Dan 

Great, thank you, Jack. And then we've got one final one, I suppose you probably covered a little bit of this in your in your answer to Aaron but I've got Dave here and he's saying that they do quite a lot of domestic surveys, so the floor plans are typically the same if they're doing, say, a street of houses. 

Dan 

Can they draw one draw plan and then copy that for all of the other properties? Is that something you can do? I suppose that would be from the load template would it Kim? 

Kim 

Yes, that's, that's using a template. Yes, that sounds right. So yes, you can, I don't know if we can still see it on the Alpha Draw page, we could, but there's a there's an option on there to save the drawings a template. 

Kim 

So if you do first your, your simple drawing, to get the floor plan right, you can then save that as a template and it's saved locally on your device. And as you come to do another floor or another project, I think it's either. 

Jack 

So once you've saved it, it's saved locally like Kim says and then essentially whenever you're in the drawing area about the draw, you can just tap on load template and it will open up a list of all the templates that you saved in the past and then you can just tap on that and it will load it through. 

Jack 

So yeah, really helpful for when you're doing a big domestic job and all of the domestic properties are pretty much the same. 

Dan 

Great, thank you. We've got a few more questions coming in, so yeah, keep them coming guys. I think we've got time for a couple more. So we've got one from Darren and he's just asking what's the best format for uploading existing floor plans 

Jack 

It should work with either JPG or PNG, either of those, as long as it's a suitable width and size and a suitable image type, just a JPEG or PNG, it should work fine, you shouldn't run into too much trouble. 

Kim 

Yes, an image, not a PDF. 

Dan 

Yeah, great, thank you very much. We've got one here from Joe as well, and he's saying it would be useful to be able to distinguish between samples taken from the ceiling and from walls, for example, or even floors. 

Dan 

Is there anything we could do in terms of development to recognise if the sample is on a floor tile or elsewhere, perhaps shade it differently or or can we make the tag show slightly different based on where the sample is taken? 

Jack 

Not at the moment, but we are exploring a special state of capture in the Alpha Tracker mobile app, and there is the scope for us adding the drawing facility just straight into Alpha Tracker mobile, and in there we'll be linking directly to the data that you captured. 

Jack 

So we'll know if something is a floor tile or part of the ceiling or something like that, and then in future we'll be able to expand on that a lot further and do different shadings and etc. 

Kim 

Just thinking, we can just add labels, you've got a label. Yeah, you could just label it. You could just put a label in next to it. 

Jack 

But yeah. 

Kim 

Just a bit of text. 

Jack 

Yeah, so this in the future, possibly, as we build this out further at the moment, probably just restrict just to labeling for the time being. Thank you. 

Dan 

That's great. Thank you very much. We do have a couple of other questions, but I think we're probably running close to time. So what we'll do with those are the questions. We'll take note of these and we'll make sure to get back to you after the webinar. 

Dan 

Kim will be in touch about those. And yeah, we'll be in touch with you. So yeah, back over to you, Jack, I think. 

Jack 

Thanks, Dan. So like Dan says, we're just on time now, I think, to wrap up the webinar. So we'll leave it there for today. Thanks for everyone joining. That's a record for the amount of people that's joined, I think. 

Jack 

So that's really great to see. We'll get back to you on any of the outstanding questions. And yeah, we'll leave it there for today. And the next, we'll let you know in the next webinar is and what the topic will be. 

Jack 

Thank you very much!

Kim 

Thank you! 

Jack 

Thanks!