Having Red Lion issues at the moment...

A really quick background on me since I'm new here....I recently just graduated with an AAS in Electrical Automation and Robotic Technology last December, and have about 2 years of experience in this field. I'm fresh in the industry, so go easy on me with your complicated answers

Anyways, yesterday I programmed a G306 Red Lion HMI for one of our water systems here at work. I've got the basics down, such as how to import tags, make tags within Crimson, make things change colors in different states, etc. I made a couple of on-screen pushbuttons to control a valve and I CANNOT for the life of me get these buttons to manipulate the bits that I want them to.

So. Here's the deal. The button is is from the core primitives. Under properties and the action tab, I have these settings:

Operation: Push Button
Button Type: NO Momentary
Button Data: Tag

The assigned tag within Crimson is HMI_FillValvePB, which is tied to a program tag within the logic that's an XIC input tag/bit that is called Fill_PB, which is also controlled by a physical pushbutton at the station. Nothing is happening. If I push the physical pushbutton, my valve turns green and water comes out the pipe on my HMI, but if I press the button on my HMI that I made to do the same thing as physical pushbutton, nothing happens.

So then I thought, ok....maybe the Red Lion needs for the tag to be a global tag within the logic, not a program tag. And maybe it can't control a tag that is already being controlled by an outside variable or whatever. So I made a new global tag (a controller tag, not program tag) and put that in parallel with everything on my rung so that the HMI had it's own seperate tag to manipulate that rung with. Re-imported the L5k file, made the tag within Crimson, assigned it to that button, and voila. Nothing happened. Again. So if anybody could please shed some light on what the heck I'm doing wrong, it would be greatly appreciated

Using logix5000 version 20.01 and Crimson 3.0

Thanks!

Well you can't have a tag controlled by a remote device that is shared with a physical button. If the physical input is holding a zero, it will win. It might become a "1" for a few microseconds after receiving a message from the HMI ... until the input table is updated with the state of the real world hardware.

But you went beyond that and now have a separate tag for the HMI. This is good. This is very good. Next you need to make sure there is nothing in your PLC logic that is destructive to the contents of that address. Make sure communication is acutally happening.

For a test, make a new tag, could be a bit or a DINT, and put that on the Red Lion screen. Manipulate that data from RSLogix and ensure that the value on your HMI does change states. This will prove that communications exist. Matter of fact, you could use the tag you just created, just manipulate it from RSLogix and look to see what it does on the screen. If you can't turn it on and have it stay on in RSLogix, then something is overwriting it. If you can toggle it "on" and the number on your screen does not change, there is a problem with the HMI side or the communication.

And something you should include with every Crimson project is a status flag tag like:

CommsPLC1 = IsDeviceOnline("YourDeviceName")

It should return a pass or fail for the communication status of the PLC to which it is tied. I have these for each PLC my HMI is talking to, and set up alarms for it with a delay of 2000-5000ms. Often, the HMI is up and running faster than the PLC is ready to respond when you cycle power to a system, and a time delay can prevent nuiscance alarms on power up.

OkiePC said:

Well you can't have a tag controlled by a remote device that is shared with a physical button. If the physical input is holding a zero, it will win. It might become a "1" for a few microseconds after receiving a message from the HMI ... until the input table is updated with the state of the real world hardware.

But you went beyond that and now have a separate tag for the HMI. This is good. This is very good. Next you need to make sure there is nothing in your PLC logic that is destructive to the contents of that address. Make sure communication is acutally happening.

For a test, make a new tag, could be a bit or a DINT, and put that on the Red Lion screen. Manipulate that data from RSLogix and ensure that the value on your HMI does change states. This will prove that communications exist. Matter of fact, you could use the tag you just created, just manipulate it from RSLogix and look to see what it does on the screen. If you can't turn it on and have it stay on in RSLogix, then something is overwriting it. If you can toggle it "on" and the number on your screen does not change, there is a problem with the HMI side or the communication.

And something you should include with every Crimson project is a status flag tag like:

CommsPLC1 = IsDeviceOnline("YourDeviceName")

It should return a pass or fail for the communication status of the PLC to which it is tied. I have these for each PLC my HMI is talking to, and set up alarms for it with a delay of 2000-5000ms. Often, the HMI is up and running faster than the PLC is ready to respond when you cycle power to a system, and a time delay can prevent nuiscance alarms on power up.

Click to expand...

Okay, I'm an idiot. But thanks to your response I was able to identify the issue. I forgot that I needed another XIO contact of the HMI controlled bit to unlatch my close valve coil. Sigh......sometimes...I swear haha.

But thanks again you the man!!