DASABCIP watchdog

Hello everybody
I have a InTouch 11 communicating to CompactLogix PLC via DASABCIP.

There have been some power loss issues at the plant (not related to my system) and the PLC looses power. However the Intouch is still active and shows no indication that communication to PLC is lost.

I've tried to manipulate DASABCIP database settings without any good result.

Does anyone have a solution how to work this out?

BR. Einar

You may first want to look at what version of DAS you are running and check with WW for service packs and hot fixes. Seems odd that you are not getting a 'bad quality' status when the PLC is down. Typically your entire HMI is going to complain. Are there logs in the SMC during that time that talk about socket loss and so on?

For a simple heartbeat you could have the PLC set a tag to true and a condition script in intouch to set it false when it sees it and so on and so on. So if you don't see a change in state in x time, then you can open a window with a message. Obviously there is more than one way to setup a heart beat so you can be creative here.

Thanks for your reply Mort81. I'm running the latest version of DAS (5.x i think).

I did set a PLC tag to true hoping it would go to false when communication is down. I did not get any changes in HMI until I restarted the windowviewer (all values remain the same for this topic).

I would prefer a standard solution above creativity

How is the bad quality status visualized in the HMI. Is it a system variable in the IO server? If so, I may have to add it to my system.

Sorry, when I read intouch 11, I was assuming you were using app server, not intouch standalone. So scratch what I said about tag status. On your heart beat, you need to set the value on both sides and create a see-saw effect:

PLC set True, then HMI reads True then set False, then PLC reads False then set it True, repeat.

This cycle happens in milliseconds, so you can setup the watch dog to see if the data stops changing and is stuck at either True or False for longer than 'x' time.

On a side note, troubleshooting DAS issues can be tricky, so if you have WW support it will be your best bet.

Thanks for your help. Was hoping that there was a more simple standard solution.

I'll do it with an application- and data change script I guess.

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=79060

Br.Einar