Is It possible question for factory talk SE

Hello, Just signed up and thought I would just jump right in and start asking questions. I work at a water plant as an operator, and am also working on obtaining my electricians license and instrumentation tech certification. I used to be a mechanical engineer and did a little control work with that.

My question is in regards to a SCADA system running on factory talk site edition (don't ask me which version, probably outdated even though we just got it). Im hoping to start working with a third party guy we use for the plc and scada work to begin rebuilding and improving our system one piece at a time.

What Im wondering is if it would be possible to have a pop up window or automatically bring up a special screen in the event of an alarm condition being activated. In this page or window i would like to have displayed a alarm message, the current value of the instrument that is in alarm, the alarm set points (maybe with some flashing red animation to show which set point high or low triggered the alarm), alarm acknowledge and reset buttons, as well as display a trend of the instrument value, and maybe some other random information.

From a simpletons mind like mine this seems easy enough for somebody who knows what they are doing. Like i said i'll be working with a third party guy for this but I know nothing about factory talk, so one i want to learn a little bit through the process, two i want to make sure I'm not sending us down a rabbit hole while the time clock is running.

Thanks and hopefully ill be posting a lot more questions and learning a lot from you guys.

Welcome to the forum!

Is it possible? Yes. Is it straightforward? Not with FTView.

You could relatively easily make a generic popup to which you can pass a reference to a particular instrument. If the PLC code for everything you want to display and/or control is all nicely wrapped up in one or two UDT's or AOI's, even easier. But then you have to delve into VBA to make it automatically monitor the alarm tags and pop up your window. And the VBA involved here is far, far more complex than it has any right to be.

Now, if you were using Ignition SCADA...

I feared it would be more complicated and its may be impossible to truely answer without seeing the system. There is already a bunch of alarms set up that are monitored. My problem with the current system, is an alarm goes off, triggering the plant horns, an operator has to go to the computer, navigate to the alarm screen, see which alarm is active, then go to the trends screen and go into the trend for that instrument and see if the alarm is just a momentary spike, or if something is truely going on. It would save us as operators a lot of time if when the alarm went off a window popped up that contained all the information we needed to take care of the alarm.

Now this is on a pretty complex system, our plant has 3 controllogixs and 1 flex i/o, there are also two other facilities on the system and a bunch of remote distrubition sites.