Any HART I/O Card Gurus?

Need help on setting up some 1756-IF8H cards in Logix 5000. Never had to use HART cards before but customer has requested using them on their flow and pressure transmitters. Anyway here are my main question at this point:

1. Calibrating, the manual on the cards say "RSLogix 5000 software provides a software interface to perform calibration." Does this mean that I would be able to calibrate the transmitters from Control Logix?

2. Customer will do hand held calibration at the transmitters also. If they put a transmitter in to calibration will just that channel go in to calibration or the entire card? The reason I ask is that I only see on calibrating bit for the enitire card and not for each channel.

3. On the alarms, is there a way in the card configuration to put a delay on just one of the alarms? Example one of the Low alarms will need to have about a 5s delay so that it is not a nuisance alarm.

Welcome to PLCs.net. You must have prior forum experience elsewhere, the extensive level of information you provided is not typical of first time posters.I can offer some generic HART answers only, but I have no specific experience with your software/hardware combo.

Very, very few users use HART in the multidrop mode. Most use HART point by point, meaning transmitter #1 on AI 1, xmtr #2 on AI 2, etc.

Some people will read the primary process variable from HART, some are content with the primary variable as the analog value 4-20mA value, many take the 2nd or 3rd variables. HART is not known for its fast update rate. I forget the exact value, but 1200 baud comes to mind as the modulation frequency on the FSK signal riding the 4-20mA.

Some read the diagnostics available from HART.

Most use HART to configure the field instruments: tag name, range, eng. units. In order avoid confusion, I call setting the range, writing a tag name, selecting engineering units, etc 'configuration', rather than 'calibration'. I use 'calibration' when one compares a reading to a standard and makes an adjustment to bring the reading to where the standard reads).

In answer to your question whether you can calibrate the field transmitters with the software; you can undoubtably configure the transmitters with the software, that's what HART is all about. I'm not sure whether you can actually 'calibrate'; for instance by applying a deadweight pressure and forcing the transmitter to consider that value it's span value.

I suspect that the AI card's cal bit is likely there to cal the 4-20mA zero/span. If you read the primary variable by HART then there really isn't any need for calibrating the AI.

The nature of HART is that the HART signal rides on a single 4-20 signal (multidrop excluded), so that when a handheld is used, whatever the handheld HART does, it does to the field transmitter that the 4-20 is coming from.

Dan

1. Calibrating, the manual on the cards say "RSLogix 5000 software provides a software interface to perform calibration." Does this mean that I would be able to calibrate the transmitters from Control Logix?

Click to expand...

Rslogix provides interface to calibrate PLC input only, you can't calibrate instrument directly. You can send HART calibration commands to the instrument using CIP messages and Fieldcare, but Rslogix5000 by itself will not calibrate your instrument

2. Customer will do hand held calibration at the transmitters also. If they put a transmitter in to calibration will just that channel go in to calibration or the entire card? The reason I ask is that I only see on calibrating bit for the enitire card and not for each channel.

Click to expand...

If you are talking about HART handheld, then it will calibrate an individual trasmitter, it will not do anything to the card itself.

3. On the alarms, is there a way in the card configuration to put a delay on just one of the alarms? Example one of the Low alarms will need to have about a 5s delay so that it is not a nuisance alarm.

Click to expand...

You can condition low alarm bits in your program with timer if you want, you don't have to use module input tag as-is.
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Just FYI: Any logix analog card comes out of factory pre-calibtrated to its specification and no need to calibrate input at all. You must have precision calibration source to do this calibration

Thanks for the input guys. I have been a “lurker” for a while and finally decided to post. I'm still kind of new to PLC programming.

Guess that makes more sense that the calibration bit that I am seeing in the tags is for the cards, which I meant to ask in my originally post but left that question out. I think that I am just going to setup the card to go ahead and do the scaling and that will be about it. After reviewing the customers requirements, still not sure why they choose the HART cards as they are not going to be doing anything really with any additional variables. I'll need to monitor the alarms through the code because several of them will need to have some delays in them to not be nuisances. Also we have a generic Alarm handler that my company uses so monitoring them in the code will keep it consistent with our base graphics package as well, ie not as much tag changing needed.

HALLO
CAN HELP ME PLEASE HOW I CAN LEARN HART AND BECOMES PROFISINAL ON IT

AND I U CAN GIVE ME LINK FOR
Configuration and calibration SOFTWARE AS (AMS )