AB L71/PV alarm help!

Hey all, hope your day has been wonderful.

I’ve been asked by a local company to drive 10 hours to finish programming and tuning a machine they had built by another company in NY so they can run off, tear down and ship to MI. The machine works, but needs to be finished.

Their programmer left for some reason, but the local company here want’s someone local here as well to button it up and provide local support.

Specs are L71 on V28 and PV on V8.20.

The thing I am stumped with at the moment is there are 546 alarms that need to be added to the PV, not a problem. However, the alarms are latched in the PLC program and require a bit to be toggled for each specific alarm to break the alarm condition rung.

There are 78 CCI Power SCR’s over EtherNet/IP. Each has 7 alarms that can get latched, and 7 respective bits to clear the latch.

There is an AOI for the alarms and applied to the individual SCR’s. The AOI has the alarm latch and acknowledgement bit.

My question, does anyone have any insight as to what is going on here? This methodology is something I am not familiar with, and not sure of the intent.

There's this new technology called aircraft, that gets you to your destination quicker and more safely than a 10 hour drive.

It's difficult to not speculate without looking at the program.

LOL! I have to bring a lot of stuff with me, and am scared to death of those little puddle jumpers. Flight is 6 hours 45 min, then have to drive almost another hour.
It would be a wash on time with everything involved, but I will have everything I need, and my truck is quite comfortable. Plus, want to stop at a recommended kennel in the area and check out some Springer Spaniel's. If I go thru Canada its 8.5 hours. Think my DL is one of those enhanced ones so I could cross to the US without a passport. That's messed up!

Unfortunately, I don't have permission to post the code at this time. Hopefully you can see the alarm latch here in the AOI.
BTW, by looking at the bits, there are about 312 active alarms in the PLC that need to be cleared. They don't do anything else but present an alarm.

In my projects, I use AOIs when I have a well-tested code that it can be used many times in the logic. One of the advantages of this approach is I can develop an unique HMI screen to show information related to the AOI (or a group of AOIs) and dinamically point to tags on the PLC.

It's possible that the original programmer was thinking something similar... or he/she was just copying the style of another programmer.

The only think I can think of is that there might have been some kind of plan for a remote monitoring system that would log the fault and then toggle the acknowledge bit once logged.

I'd say it's just a matter of the operator being forced to acknowledge each alarm before clearing it - sort of a "yes, I have seen this alarm and will take the required action" thing.

I don't think I've ever done individual alarm acknowledgement in FTView ME before, but in SE it's as simple as defining the acknowledge tag for each alarm when you set up the rest of the alarm parameters. On your alarm display object, you put an alarm acknowledge button. When the operator selects an alarm and presses the alarm acknowledge button, that tag is set to 1. You can also add an "acknowledge all" button, which when pressed, will set to 1 all of the acknowledge bits that relate to all current alarms (not all 546 of them - just the alarms currently shown on the alarm display).

Have a poke around in the alarm setup and see if you can't find an acknowledge connection of some sort. If it were me, I'd be setting up one or two, and then exporting the setup to XML and doing the other 544 in Notepad++

The only other thing to check is whether or not the acknowledge tag is reset to zero after the alarm clears. Maybe the HMI does it, or maybe your original programmer has put something in the code to reset the acknowledge bit when the alarm has cleared. If it's being left up to the HMI, I'd probably add something to the PLC anyway. If the "reset acknowledge bit" message gets dropped, according to the logic above, you alarm will never go off again.

Thank you for the replies!!

ASF, you hit it right on the money!!!
I followed thru everything you said in your post. There is a place to drop an ACK tag back to the source. When the Ack button on the alarm in the HMI is pressed it writes a 1 to that tag, when released it it sets back to zero. There is no code in the PLC program to do this as a backup, so I will add something.

I set up the alarms and messages for the first SCR. Exported the XML and opened in note pad. That works Great! Thank You, Thank You for that time saving tip!!!

HMI is actually a 17" Advantech panel PC with a 15 screen runtime. With the alarm screen, that will be 15. Ummm, think I might need a few more to finish up.

Nice thing is, only have to head that way for one day to get familiar with the equipment, then they will ship to it's destination about 20 miles from our shop and we can finish it there.

This place is Great, Thank You All!