How to show Gauge or sensor Status

[neilh10]

I'm putting this up for discussion as a new feature. When some part of the EQUIPMENT, the node or sensor equipment has an issue, it would be good to be able to report it and make it visible on MMW.

The basis is that the "common equipment", the core wireless equipment, or Mayfly computer, is functioning, but some other part of the equipment, such as a sensor is in operable.

MMW is setup to visualize readings of sensors, however there is no way to report the equipment status of the gauge or sensor.

Currently for the enviroDIY release of ModularSensors/Mayfly the status of a sensor is typically reported via an "inband" reading of -9999. That is the sensor is "Out of operation" when a magic value is reported, however this can be so common as to interfere with actual interpretation of the data as described in https://github.com/ODM2/ODM2DataSharingPortal/issues/572

One source of an extensive discussion about sensors meta data and equipment status is NIST sponsored IEEE 1451.0 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4338161

1451.0-2007 - IEEE Standard for a Smart Transducer Interface for Sensors and Actuators - Common Functions, Communication Protocols, and Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) Formats

There are extensive other Computer Science discussion on a management stack reporting in parallel with a communications stack. The current MMW implementation only supports the "communications stack"