Logix Based Tag Alarms: Using PAx with Alarms & Events

Good afternoon everyone. Just starting to use Logix based tag alarms, and I am likely a little confused.

What I would like to do: Use Logix 33 with PAx 4.1 objects in FTV SE 13.0 and have a P_Din alarm show up in the "Alarm & Event Summary View".

My instant reaction would be to navigate in Logix to Alarm Manager > Alarm Definition > Add Alarm Definition > Select P_Din under Input > Use either Alm_IOFault or Alm_TstDisagree.

"Alarm cannot be created for this input tag..."

If I cannot select the P_Alarm tags within the P_Din Logic, how can I best bring the P_Din instruction alarms to the Alarm & Events in the HMI Client?

Perhaps I am thinking about the use of the Alarm Manager incorrectly.
I am reading from the publications.

FTAE-RM001N
FTAE-RM001M
VIEWSE-UM006P

Thanks for your help.

Welcome to Rockwell world.

If you open the parameters of the P_DIn instruction, you'll notice that they are indeed aliases of a tag. And since that tag is a UDT and sits within a UDT, you can't use that tag as the alarm source either.

This is why PlantPAX 4.10 still uses the FT Alarms and Events configuration and even ships with a tool for you to create your alarm configuration in order to import them into the FTSE application.

I've been looking at PAX 5 now and there it now uses the Tag based alarms, but I'm sure there's been a **** up somewhere in the implementation (my bet is on the gating) since they can use that facility to create analog alarms, but don't and instead map the digital alarms calculated by the instruction.

Thanks for the response Cardo.

I know modifying prebuilt AOIs is generally frowned upon, but what about editing the PAx block P_DIN AOI and just creating a rung that transfers the alarms into a new tag that I create and then it would then be eligible to be used as an alarm source?

So for my rung I would have XIO STS_IOFault going to my OTE ALARM.
I don't use the ALARM bit anywhere within the PAx AOI.
In alarm manager I can select my Alarm with no issues.

Will this cause me headaches?

Depends on the application, I think. If you're the end user developing this and are aware of the difference AND always use the modified version for standardization, then it should be ok.

If you do decide to modify things, I suppose the easiest and less intrusive way is to remove the Aliasing that is preventing you to do this and map the bits individually.

Bear in mind that the alarm manager has some interesting stuff you can access that the P_DIn and graphics don't make use of. If you create a tag named TestAlarm, assign an alarm to it in the Alarm Manager, then type TestAlarm.@Alarms or .@alarmset, you get a bunch of information about the alarm and setting. As usual, Rockwell doesn't document these things and leaves people hanging, but it's a cool feature.

Awesome, thanks for taking the time to explain. I'll try that out with the TestAlarm idea.
Have a good one.

No problem. I've developed one application on 4.10 and am now looking developing one in PlantPAX 5 and notice the difference. PlantPAX 5 does make use of the alarm manager exclusively. However, there seems to be a bit of a bug in some of the objects with regards to alarming... I haven't had time to go through it fully, but it seems this way.