iFix alarm counters

cardosocea

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Hello,

I have an iFix system with two redundant servers and a few clients and the alarm system is set up in a way where iFix sends over the alarm counter to the PLC and if there is an unacknowledged alarm, the alarm horn goes off.

I'm using AB PLC's and IGS driver to communicate.

Although I can see tags named as alarm counters that are working, these are set as AI blocks. However, what I'm really confused about is where is the tag written to from the alarm counters in iFix.

Anyone ever configured these? This is a system that has gone through quite a few iFix version upgrades and what I'm looking at may actually be remnants of a previous version configuration.

Any advice?
 
I went through those... and from that page, if I wanted to send the TOTAL alarm count to a PLC, I would create an AI block with one of those variables from the SIM driver and then map it with the Next block to an AO that would send the value over to the PLC. I will try this out today.

What is bugging me is that I have no tags in the PDB that read these alarm counter values defined on that page and the only tag I have that transmits a counter value is an AI. However, I can't figure out what writes to this tag in the first place.
I went through all the configuration points in iFix and cannot find where this would tag is updated with the actual counter value.

The "problem" with this is that I'll be replacing PLC's soon and these tags and settings will have to be modified. I will follow the recommendation from GE to set up the new counters, but I still need to get rid of the current ones.
 
If it's not using the database using the NEXT then it's possible that a VBA script on a picture is doing it.

Some people would use a "hidden" picture to run VBA that runs all the time since VBA has to attach to a picture.
 
Could be... I had a look around the pictures, although not in depth to see if I could find this.

I'm thinking though how would it work in a picture since the servers are not used to display images, only the clients do that so how would that work in terms of updating the tag?
 
Looking back, I feel like a bit of an idiot... but I managed to find where the alarm counters are coming from.

I was again looking for them through iFix project explorer and noticed a scheduler folder... now, to me a scheduler is something you want to do at certain times or at any given interval (in the minutes and above range) so I never paid any attention to this.

I looked into it today and inside there were scripts scheduled to run whenever the tag with the alarm counters changed and to write that value over to the PLC's.

GE doesn't mention this as a way to do it, they're actually quite specific on how to achieve the alarm counters on the PDB, so I was wondering if anyone has seen it done this way.
The way I see it, it's probably not a great solution as there is some logic checking if the value changed and copying it across to a tag instead of copying without any processing. What do you guys think?
 

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