Demo Walkthrough

The Fleetera platform includes demo environments with simulated industrial data sources. This walkthrough shows you how to explore the platform using a simulated wind farm, so you can learn the features without needing physical equipment.

What the demo includes

The demo environment provides:

• A wind turbine simulator — an OPC UA server that generates realistic turbine telemetry data (active power, wind speed, rotor RPM, temperatures, and more)
• A BESS simulator — combined OPC UA and Modbus TCP server simulating a battery energy storage system
• Pre-provisioned edge VPS instances running the simulators accessible via the VPN mesh network

The simulators produce physics-based values that change over time, mimicking real equipment behavior.

Step 1 — Create a demo site

1. Navigate to Sites and click + New Site
2. Enter a name (for example, "Demo Wind Farm")
3. Set the Site Category to Renewable Energy Site
4. Set Status to Active
5. Click Create Site

Step 2 — Set up the asset structure

Create a turbine template

1. Navigate to Templates and create a new template (for example, "Demo Turbine")
2. Add child templates for subsystems:
   • Generator
   • Rotor
   • Ambient System
3. Add variables from the wind turbine library:
   • Turbine level — active power, reactive power, turbine state
   • Generator — generator speed, generator temperature
   • Rotor — rotor speed, blade pitch angle
   • Ambient — wind speed, wind direction, ambient temperature

Instantiate turbines

1. Open your demo site and go to the Asset Hierarchy tab
2. Click Instantiate from Template
3. Select your demo turbine template
4. Create 3–5 turbines using bulk instantiation

Step 3 — Connect to the simulator

The wind turbine simulator exposes an OPC UA server. To connect:

1. Go to the Connectors tab on your site
2. Click + New Connector
3. Configure the connector:
   • Protocol — OPC UA
   • Name — for example, "Wind Farm Simulator"
   • Endpoint — use the simulator's VPN IP address (for example, opc.tcp://100.x.x.x:4840/UA/WindFarmSimulator)
   • Security Policy — None
   • Security Mode — None
   • Authentication — Anonymous
4. Click Create Connector

Step 4 — Discover the simulator's data model

Before binding variables, populate the connector's data model by running a discovery crawl:

1. Open the simulator connector and go to the Data Model tab
2. Expand the Run Discovery section
3. Set the start node to "Objects" and click Start Crawl
4. Wait for the crawl to complete — a new data model version is created automatically
5. Browse the tree to see the simulator's structure:

WindFarm
├── Turbine_001
│   ├── ActivePower
│   ├── ReactivePower
│   ├── WindSpeed
│   ├── WindDirection
│   ├── RotorSpeed
│   ├── GeneratorSpeed
│   ├── BladePitchAngle
│   ├── NacelleTemperature
│   └── ...
├── Turbine_002
│   └── ...
└── Turbine_003
    └── ...

6. Click on data points to see their data types and addresses (for example, ns=2;s=Turbine_001.ActivePower)

Step 5 — Bind variables

Use match suggestions for the fastest setup:

1. Go to the connector's Bindings tab
2. Click Run Matching to start the AI matching process
3. Wait for the matching job to complete (progress is shown in an inline banner)
4. Review the inline suggestions — the simulator's node names closely match standard variable names, so most matches should have high confidence
5. Click Accept All High-Confidence to create bindings in bulk
6. Review and accept any remaining suggestions individually

Repeat for each turbine, adjusting the OPC UA node paths to point to the correct turbine in the simulator (for example, Turbine_001, Turbine_002).

Step 6 — Deploy an edge gateway

If an edge VPS is available in the demo environment:

1. Go to the Edge Gateway tab
2. Click + Add Deployment
3. Enter a name and select the architecture (the demo VPS typically runs amd64)
4. Copy the installation command and run it on the demo VPS

If no edge VPS is available, you can run the edge gateway locally using Docker on any Linux machine or virtual machine.

Step 7 — Publish and observe

1. On the deployment detail page, click Publish Config (or wait for auto-publish)
2. Watch the sync status progress from Pending to Applying to In Sync
3. Once in sync, the edge gateway begins reading simulated data from the OPC UA server

Exploring the platform

With the demo running, explore these platform features:

Deployment monitoring

Open the deployment detail page to see:

• Real-time status and heartbeat information
• The event timeline showing lifecycle events
• Config sync status with desired vs. applied versions

Asset hierarchy

Navigate the asset tree to see how turbines and their subsystems are organized. Each asset shows its variables with binding status.

Connector health

Check the connector detail page to see the connector status and attached assets.

Config sync

Try making changes and observing the sync flow:

1. Add a new variable to a turbine
2. Create a binding for it
3. Watch the config sync status update (auto-publish triggers a new desired version)
4. Observe the edge gateway apply the change

Template operations

Experiment with template features:

1. Create a new version of the turbine template with additional variables
2. Use template migration to upgrade existing turbine assets
3. Export the template as JSON and re-import it

Cleaning up

When you are done exploring, you can:

• Delete the demo site (this also soft-deletes all assets, connectors, and bindings)
• Stop the edge gateway on the VPS: docker compose down
• Delete the gateway from the Gateways section