PanelView Plus Alarms

beethoven_ii · Feb 25, 2014

I am working with an Allen Bradley PanelView Plus 700 HMI screen (Part No. 2711P-T7C4D8) and seem to be having problems with my alarms. The screen works fine all day but each time I arrive on site in the morning no active alarms are being displayed. Everything else on the screen seems to be working fine. This I assume is due to the alarm buffer having become full. After a quick reboot all is well again. I have added a button to clear the alarm history which it does but it doesn't restore my active alarms.

In my project I have one page which displays active alarms and one page which displays the alarm history. In the alarm settings I have defined my display Active Alarms for alarm messages and set it to display both Active and acknowledged and Active and unacknowledged alarms. On my alarm history page I have set it to display both active and inactive alarms which are acknowledged and unacknowledged. I have tried reducing the history from the default value of 128 to 96 and now down to 64 which has made no difference. I have also tried reducing the alarm update time from the default 1 second to 2 seconds but again this has made no difference.

I took the screen apart yesterday and it doesn't look like there is any way to increase memory size (Just an SD card slot) and there are no sliders in the screen control panel to adjust program and RAM usage.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Barry

beethoven_ii · Feb 25, 2014

I've just done a test to trigger an alarm on a timer to fill up my buffer and realised that what is happening is that once the buffer is full my active alarms are still displaying but any that were true at the time the buffer filled need to change state in order to be displayed again. Any new active alarms work but ones that were present at the time the buffer became full disappear from the display and won't reappear until they change state. I understand what is happening but have never noticed this before on other screens. I may be able to program a workaround to fill all alarms with zero each time the alarm count reaches my buffer size unless anyone else has a better solution?

Regards,

Barry

CharlieMSU · Nov 30, 2018

I’m having the very same problem! Every morning my alarm screen is empty, but full of alarms once I reboot the HMI. If you’ve been able to fix it, how did you do? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Charlie

BruceJW · Nov 30, 2018

beethoven_ii said:
I am working with an Allen Bradley PanelView Plus 700 HMI screen (Part No. 2711P-T7C4D8) and seem to be having problems with my alarms. The screen works fine all day but each time I arrive on site in the morning no active alarms are being displayed. Everything else on the screen seems to be working fine. This I assume is due to the alarm buffer having become full. After a quick reboot all is well again. I have added a button to clear the alarm history which it does but it doesn't restore my active alarms.

In my project I have one page which displays active alarms and one page which displays the alarm history. In the alarm settings I have defined my display Active Alarms for alarm messages and set it to display both Active and acknowledged and Active and unacknowledged alarms. On my alarm history page I have set it to display both active and inactive alarms which are acknowledged and unacknowledged. I have tried reducing the history from the default value of 128 to 96 and now down to 64 which has made no difference. I have also tried reducing the alarm update time from the default 1 second to 2 seconds but again this has made no difference.

I took the screen apart yesterday and it doesn't look like there is any way to increase memory size (Just an SD card slot) and there are no sliders in the screen control panel to adjust program and RAM usage.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Barry

While I am not as clued up as I should be with the Panelviews, apparently that 64 is the Alarm History buffer size. Apparently if the buffer gets full, new active alarms won't show in the alarm list.

Maybe trying increasing that 64 a bit. It can go up to 10000 apparently.

beethoven_ii · Nov 30, 2018

Increasing the size of the alarm buffer doesn't solve the problem, it just delays the time until it happens and reduces the frequency of it occurring. I will have a look later what I did in my code to try and resolve this.

GaryS · Nov 30, 2018

This may help
You can add a USB flash drive to the Panelview Plus you have to lookup how to set it up. You may also be able to map a network drive after all they are running Windows.

As for the alarms not showing up, each alarm will only show up once unless you reset the alarm in the PLC or as you have done reboot the Panelview. Clearing the alarm off the screen will not necessarily clear the alarm in the PLC unless you have set it up to that.
In your case the alarm may still be set in the PLC only cleared in the Panelview
Then when you reboot the Panelview all the alarms again show up.

I like to setup my alarms with a few extra controls

Master Reset or Reset All
Alarm Reset
Acknowledge All
Alarm Acknowledge
Show Alarms

Because Alarms pop up in front of the other screens you can’t see the other screens or operate the other buttons until you clear the alarms. But if the alarm is still pending in the PLC then it will just pop up again. The acknowledge will clear the alarm off the screen and without resetting them in the PLC.
There are times that you don’t want to reset an alarm until somebody checks the cause of the alarm and corrects the problem.
I hope this helps

beethoven_ii · Nov 30, 2018

Hi Charlie, I've reviewed my code and what I did was to put in some logic to count the number of alarms. I added 1 to a DINT each time a new alarm occurred. When the alarm counter reached my buffer maximum value I moved 0 into my alarm arrays to clear them all and also reset the counter. This forces any active alarms to trigger again so they are displayed on the HMI screen. The only downside is the time the alarm originally occurred at is then lost. For what I was doing at the time this worked for me.

Maybe someone else has a better solution, but no-one came up with one when I asked the question nearly 5 years ago.

janner_10 · Nov 30, 2018

Quick question - Have you got too many alarms?

Are they all actual alarms, ie something has gone wrong - or are you using them to as notifications?

That many alarms over a short period will just get them ignored over time.

beethoven_ii · Dec 1, 2018

In my case the screen in question was displaying alarms from 6 production lines. Each line had it’s own PV600 screen but we fitted a site overview screen which was a PanelView Plus 700. The problem was that when the alarm buffer filled the screen didn’t just drop the oldest alarm to make room for the newest, it cleared the entire buffer. Any new alarms that occurred after that were displayed ok but any that had been active at the time the buffer cleared would not be displayed.

PanelView Plus Alarms

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