Red Lion C3 Scaling

Well, I got my first red lion HMI (G304K) yesterday to replace a PV300 Micro.

It only took about 4 hours to learn enough to convert the application. The tag import utility mentioned in another thread worked great and saved me a lot of time.

The software is very cool. I love the intuitive nature of the graphics editor. Since I imported tags, a lot of the display items were a simple drag and drop. I figured out how to format the first one and then assign that format to the others. It was a breeze to align things, copy and paste objects, pages, and formats. The alignment lines that appear when moving things around is very cool.

Now I need some help with scaling some values. I did glance in the help file (which needs some bookmarks and page jump links), but did not find clear answers to how scaling will work.

I have a value that comes from the SLC as an integer N7:230 and represents a tank level in percent times ten, so a value of 115 means 11.5%.

To scale this, in Crimson 3.0 do I just put "1" for digits after DP and leave the scaling turned off?

Also, there are two timers that write to Timer presets. In the SLC the timers are 1 second timebase, but in the old panvelview they're scaled in minutes.

In the PB32 app, the tag scale is 0.0166666666667. (1/60)

How do I replicate this in Crimson 3 so that these values will show as minutes, but be converted to seconds for the SLC when they're changed on the HMI?

On the tank level, you can do it two ways. First, you can just treat the number as an integer and display it with a forced decimal. This is the easiest, but it means that the number is still used internally in the same form as in the AB, so any math will need to take this into account re the decimal position. The other method is to treat the value as an integer, but then scale it to a floating point value, with 0-1000 as the Data Range and 0-100 as the Display Range. This will give you a floating point value, making any math easier. When you display it, you'll still have to specify the number of decimals, though, unless you just use the general format at let C3 figure it out for you.

For the timer, treat it as an integer, and scale it to an integer with a Data Range of 0-60 and a Display Range of 0-1. This will result in a minutes value which you can display as simple number. If you want to know about fractional minutes, scale to a float with the same limits. Or, you can just display the original value with a Time and Date format set to show ellapsed time with no seconds.

Thanks for the quick response, Mike. I believe I will want the values used by the HMI to be in real engineering units in most all cases, so I will scale them to floats.

For the tank level, I have changed the scaling option to "Scale to Floating Point" and set the Data From: 0 Data To: 1000, and set the Display From: 0 and Display To 100. Will that take care of values that might fall outside that range? That tank level can get to 110% or a raw value of 1100. That is what I was unsure of in the manual, but my intuition tells me the answer is yes.

For the timer, I will scale to float, so they can enter fractional minutes as they did with the PV300.

Thanks again.
Paul

And for the

Scaling does not clip, correct. I'll make a note to have someone make that clearer in the manual.

Alright, something went wrong with the timer scaling.

I set them both so that the data value of 0 to 60 is displayed as 0 to 1. I set the data entry limits for 0 to 1000. I set the tag data format to 3 before the DP and 2 after the DP (on the tag format tab) and then when I downloaded it looked good...
...until i tried changing the value. The original number in the timer was "2.00". I tried to enter "3" and the number went to zero, for a second I saw some text appear "+BIG", perhaps telling me that the number I entered was too big. So I started trynig smaller numbers, and when I entered .05, the value changed to some wild negative number and the SLC faulted. it's okay though, since I was using the test rack for these tests (thank goodness).

Also, I noticed that on the Pop-Up keypad, the entry limits shown at the bottom say "0-+BIG"

I think it's trying to tell me I screwed up somewhere...

Paul

EDIT: Nevermind...I figured out the Data Tag "Data" tab "Treat As" field had "Default Integer", so I changed it to signed integer and it's now working fine.

> Also, I noticed that on the Pop-Up keypad, the
> entry limits shown at the bottom say "0-+BIG"

That's because you've got an uppper limit of 1000 but only 3 digits before the point, so it can't be displayed within the format you've created. +BIG and -BIG are displayed if the value is too large for the format.

> Nevermind...I figured out the Data Tag "Data" tab "Treat As"
> field had "Default Integer", so I changed it to signed integer
> and it's now working fine.

Glad it's working, but that seems counter-intuitive to me, so I'll have someone figure out why that step is required. We're aiming to make as much as possible automatic without the need for tweaking.