Using Arrays for a large range

Join Date
Feb 2016
Location
england
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I am using B&R Automation Studio on a simulation PLC. I am just playing around with some programs and have come across a problem.
I have a list of alarms for my system. If anyone of these alarms go off, i want there to be an alarm flag. This is simple enough to do by a simple OR statement made even easier because I only have 5 alarms.
However, what if I was to have 100 alarms, it would take a long time to enter these all in maunally. My first thoughts are to put all the alarms into an array so then I can access any element easily, but in order to do this would I not need to type all these variables into the system anyway? so I wouldn't be saving a great deal of time? Is there a way or a function block I can utilise so that I can skip the manual process of entering 100+ variables into an array?
Thanks
 
I would look deep and hard for an existing tag or flag that does this for you. I'm not familiar with B&R stuff, but many others I have worked with have a built in function or tag to tell you whether alarms are present or how many are active.
 
In B&R world (pre-Mapp), you just link an array of BOOLs to an Alarm group in the HMI to trigger different alarms. The Visual Components HMI editor in Automation Studio can generate group alarms that are active if any alarm in the specified group is active and you can pull that back down into the program, but I always just checked with a loop like I posted because it was more straight forward than setting up groups in the HMI.

Mapp is their new effort to reduce programming time and it has a whole Alarm handling system. I'm not super familiar with it, but it looks like it greatly simplifies motion control error handling, but probably doesn't change much for simple logic driven alarms.
 

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