Red Lion Crimson 3.1 Alarm Viewer and retentive data Problem

Hi all,

Although I am working with my first Graphite display, this isn't my first go-around with Crimson. I started working with a few things on the display, writing a simple program for some animation, playing with the SetIconLed() function, etc.

I added a flag tag and a numeric tag and set-up alarms for them to test the alarm/event viewers and the alarm ticker and I cannot get these alarms to initiate/show up in the alarm viewer. I have been able to see them show up twice. The first time it was right after changing the alarm Icon LED function back to "system". I thought this was the issue but changing it back to "user configured" or back to "system" does not do the trick. The second time was changing the data to "retentive" and restarting the screen.

Now the "retentive" data isn't being retained during a power cycle. Something seems wrong. I have never had problems with setting up alarms.

When I get weird stuff happening I factory reset the device and reload from scratch. As you are just having a go I would dump the current project and start a clean one of those as well. If that doesn't fix it then post some screen shots of how you have set up the alarms.

I solved this after some trial and error . I have a looping program for animating images that I had set to same as caller. It wouldn't let the system continue to run its alarm code. I set the looping program to run in Background and everything works as programmed. The retentive data tags weren't retaining data because I was downloading configuration changes so fast that I never allowed the system to write the retentive data tags to flash, which I understand happens every 5 minutes or so.

Crimson background tasks

Just a side note. You would think that 'background 1' is the highest priority background task but it's actually just the opposite. '1' has the lowest priority and '3' has the highest.

I've seen on a large database that is very busy that sometimes background task 1 won't even run.

ERCfarcontrol said:

I solved this after some trial and error . I have a looping program for animating images that I had set to same as caller. It wouldn't let the system continue to run its alarm code. I set the looping program to run in Background and everything works as programmed. The retentive data tags weren't retaining data because I was downloading configuration changes so fast that I never allowed the system to write the retentive data tags to flash, which I understand happens every 5 minutes or so.

Click to expand...

There is probably a way to animate without using a program, and definitely without looping. I normally use the animated image object and put an expression that resolves to an integer which selects the image I want.

I am cycling through 8 images in intervals of 100ms.

ERCfarcontrol said:

I am cycling through 8 images in intervals of 100ms.

Click to expand...

Here's how I cycle through 3 images when a burner is on by using DisplayCount%3 (% = modulo). I don't know the exact timing, but it is a nice fast flickering flame.

When the burner tag is off, the expression resolves to 0.