panelbuilder alarms

I want to put an ack and an ack all tag on my alarm banner and currently have an ack that is fed into the processor and then programmed to clear both the panels i have hooked up. How can I make it so the ack all also clears both panels? It only clears the side you are on. I can find nothing on this in help files or the manual.
hope this is clear enough...

Thanks

As far as I know, you cannot do this, at least I have not found a way either. This is one of the reasons I almost never use the built in alarming, for this reason and this reason alone.

russrmartin said:

As far as I know, you cannot do this, at least I have not found a way either. This is one of the reasons I almost never use the built in alarming, for this reason and this reason alone.

Click to expand...

Do you mean I can't clear both screens with the ack button or that I cant use both the ack button and the ack all button at the same time? Cause I have it programmed now to clear both screens when we hit the ack button on one or the other. Just not when we hit ack all. I just have a hard time I think understanding the help files cause they seem so vague to me.

welcome to the wonderfully confusing literature of allen bradley

russrmartin said:

As far as I know, you cannot do this, at least I have not found a way either. This is one of the reasons I almost never use the built in alarming, for this reason and this reason alone.

Click to expand...

Same here. Its not too difficult to setup yourself and once done you can put in your library of code to use over and over again.

In Panelview's, the alarm trigger sets a flag to the PV that tells it to display an alarm. Once the PV has displayed an alarm, it is waiting for an action to take place locally (It doesn't know that the alarm has been cleared remotely).

My solution has always been to not use the PV individual ACK's, but rather a global ACK.

Using a global ACK still requires that you clear the alarm banner from each PV individually though. It's not elegant.

Another approach I use, is to make a seperate screen, that has all alarm conditions, highlighting all that are active, then a general 'Alarm Present' banner, directing the user to the 'current active' alarms screen.

Like others have said, I roll my own Fault Screen and use a fault word(s), from the PLC to trigger Multistate(s) (1=Fault 1, 2=Fault 2, etc). In your situation, program both PVs to display the fault, then, using your PLC logic to "see" an ACK button, you could clear the fault word back to "0" and both PVs would show the Faults as cleared.

While looking to see how many discussions have been had around S88 I found this very good discussion about alarms. Check it out.

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=1964

Darren

"Cause I have it programmed now to clear both screens when we hit the ack button on one or the other."

Newbie, I'd like to know how you accomplished this? I, like the others, have not been aware that this was possible. As far as I knew, the alarm acknowledge on one PV on a system cannot clear the alarms on a separate PV on the same system. Am I missing something very simple?