Red Lion G310 Series Touch Screens reading and dropping out

Join Date
Dec 2014
Location
Louisiana
Posts
18
I returned to a facility that I had installed 3 Red Lion G310 Series Touch Screens to install a Factory Talk View workstation. The G310s have been running the facility using an Allen Bradley PLC with no problems and no lagging. I used a compact flash card to enable the TCP/IP Remote download feature, and now every touch screen terminal is acting very strange. I used the stopwatch feature on my cell phone and every 30 seconds exactly the data populates, and then 30 seconds later it loses connectivity and all data stops coming in. This cycle continued every 30 seconds for hours. Nothing I did, no settings I changed, and no back dated versions of the crimson 3.0 file I originally created change the 30 second time in/ time out. Red Lion Controls "engineer" had no helpful information, as every time i call, I don't even know why I bother. I even went so far as to take all other touch screen terminals off of the network and the single terminal I left continued the same cycle. The network that is running on the location is a redundant fiber optic loop, and with everything online I am only using 2% of the bandwidth, so I know it is not a network issue. I do know that when I used the flash card to enable the remote download feature it updated the firmware on each terminal. I highly suspect that this is what caused my problem, because that is exactly when this issue began. The problem is I cannot find any information on how to factory reset the terminals or how/if i can back date to the original firmware. Google is no help, and as I said, the Red Lion "engineer" was rude, un-informative, and tried to get me off the phone as fast as possible. The Factory Talk View station is working flawlessly, thank goodness, but neither myself nor my boss who is with me has any idea what is going on with this 30 second thing. It is our first time using the Red Lion terminals, per the customers request, and from start to finish the Red Lion terminals have been nothing but a nightmare. If anybody out there has any information that can help, I will take anything I can get. ~Mike~
 
I am surprised you got bad service. I recommend you uninstall the latest version of Crimson and install an older version (the one you had success with) and then try a download. See if that will trigger a download of the older firmware. I have not tried to revert to older firmware that I can recall.

I would not rule out a network issue though, just because the bandwidth usage is low does not mean there is not something strange going on.

Have you tried wireshark?
 
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I can try that tomorrow, but if it doesn't work, we can't think of anything else to try. We are pretty sure it was when we activated and updated the remote download feature, because it was right after we did all 3 terminals that the issue started. Is there a way to, maybe format the screen and then try the older version?
 
What PLC model are you using? Are you using mapping HMI tags to Alias tags in the PLC?

I had a issue with Alias tags doing something like to what you are experiencing.

I am also surprised that you have had issues with the Red Lion HMI's. I for one am very happy with them. But I have also had "less than stellar" experiences with their tech support. I find that the people on this site do a much better job than Red Lion. That is just my experiences.
 
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Any chance of a duplicated IP address? I also wonder if something got corrupted when being opened by the newer version. It seems like that happened to me before.

Is JeremyH still around? He used to visit this site and was who answered when I have called them. I was always able to get good answers. Red Lion is not immune to bugs and they do tend to release new versions that may have problems. Stay off the bleeding edge.
 
Does it ever finish the boot before the 30sec restart?
I have seen continuous power cycling several times on panels after a download. Typically they will not finish the boot sequence before cycling.

Typically happens after updating crimson and the download performing a firmware update. The general solution I have found that works is to revert back to an older version of Crimson and download via RS232. The firmware will update to the older version and stop the power cycling. Then re-download with the newer version.
 
We are using Allen Bradley Control Logix PLC, 5570 controller, and we are using the allen bradley L5K driver to import the tags directly, and the unit is not power cycling, its the comms that are dropping. They drop for 30 sec, then read for 30 sec etc. And i mean 30 sec to the sec. Its very strange. It seems that it was the firmware update required for remote download. I have an older version of crimson 3.0 on my virtual machine, so I will try to load from the older version and see if it over writes the firmware.
 
Older version did not work, still dropping and picking up comms every 30 sec.

As was suggested before, check for duplicated IP Addresses.

Also, if you are talking to several PLCs are they on different Protocols under the Network tree? I recommend this because if one of them is having a comms issue, it will affect the others.
 
Resolved, that is exactly what it was. I feel stupid that we were looking at the most advanced things to resolve the problem, and I accidentally duplicated an IP address in 2 of the touch screens. Thanks for the help guys, you always save my butt.
 
Good info. Thanks for sharing! You will save someone's butt down the road and probably never even hear about.

That is what makes this place great!
 

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