Red Lion G3 Remote View Logs

Alrighty, my application for case check weighing is coming along nicely, but I have some Crimson 3.0 questions. I am creating a directory on compactflash daily, and creating a file in that directory simply called data.csv. My directory is in the format yy-mm-dd, so today's directory is "10-09-23", on the root of the CF card.

Each time a case is weighed by the CompactLogix PLC, the value is sent to a 5/04 PLC which will correlate that weight with the barcode value and increment a counter.

In the G306A, I watch that value from the SLC and via event trigger with a data change of "1", I call a program that appends the csv file I created by adding a line with the date, time, barcode value and gross weight. This happens about 10,000 times a day.

Questions:

1) Am I writing to the compactflash 10,000 times per day, or does the G3 cache some of those writes and perform them in bigger blocks, or does this caching only occur when using the built-in logger?

2) When I remote view the G3 with IE8, and click on the View Logs link, I get a 404 error page not found. Have I broken the system logs by creating a directory? How can I get the system logs to work? I have never seen the system logs, but I think they might be useful.

Okie

1. If you are running your own code then yes you are writing 10000 times per day. Only the built in datalogger creates a 2 min buffer.

2. You are most likely seeing the 404 error because your file is on the root directory of the CF card. The view logs link is designed to provide access to the default logger, which stores in the Logs directory. If you create a directory called logs and put your files there you should be able to see them.

Thanks
Jeremy

1) There's no caching when you do it yourself.

2) Do you have the regular logs enabled, too?

JH beat me to it!

MikeGranby said:

2) Do you have the regular logs enabled, too?

Click to expand...

To get the events/alarms to log, do I need to "Enable Batch Logging"?

OkiePC

You will need to create a datalog even if you don't add any contents. Then you will have to put your custom CSV file in a folder with the same name as the log, within the logs folder.

Thanks
Jeremy

Okay. I am able to FTP to the IP address and view my csv files, even when they are on the root of the cf card. I created an empty log called "Log1" and added the prefix to my filename "Log1/" and now my directory and csv file is stored there.

No problem so far.

But, I thought that events and alarms and more system stuff was logged to the root of the cf card, but I am not finding anything there.

When I http to the G3, (and hit F5 to refresh) I am seeing two links, one for View Logs, and one for Remote View. The View Logs link still gives me the 404 error, because apparently the "logs" directory does not exist.

Remote View works fine, and is awesome, by the way...

OkiePC,
Can you email me your program? [email protected]

Thanks
Jeremy

Sent...

Just in case others have a similar problem of getting a 404 error when clicking on a folder under the "View Logs", I noticed that if the data logger name contains an underscore "_" (example "Station_1"), then on the compact flash, the folder name is "Station_.1" with an extra period in there....this causes the link to not find the folder and the G3 creates multiple folders all named the same with no data inside each of them.

Temporary fix would be to make sure the data logger's name does not contain an underscore.

This happens on Crimson 3 R2 build 271 and earlier. I'll try to check periodically if this gets fixed on newer builds.

David Rojas

David,

The file name must follow the standard 8.3 format, which does not include "_" or other special characters.

Thanks
Jeremy

Hi Jeremy,
I can understand file names following the 8.3 rule, but does this include folder names as well? When you copy and paste tags, pages, data loggers, etc., Crimson will automatically add an "_1" or "_2" to the name. If you leave the name of the data logger this way, Crimson will create a subfolder under Logs on the compact flash that adds a "." in the name of that folder. In DOS, folders with longer than 8 characters are truncated and converted to ~1 or ~2, but adding a period causes the web server to not find the folder on the compact flash.

If I have misunderstood something, please let me know so I can inform others.

David Rojas

Hello,

Yes the limitation is for folders as well. In the case of the datalogger you are correct that it will place a "." if the name exceeds 8 characters. However it doesn't truncate the name automatically. You still need to make sure the name follows the 8.3 format manually.

Thanks
Jeremy