Red Lion Crimson 3.0 emulator

Steve Bailey

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Trying to do some debugging for a friend. Project is a G307K2. Running Crimson 3.0 Gold Build 707.000.
The application has tags that are calculated based on values entered in Data Boxes. I put the tags modified by operator entry and the calculated tag into a Watch Window. When I run the emulator and set the Watch Window to "View Online" I can see the changes I make to the tags but the calculated tags show "n/a". The calculations are done in a program that is triggered on change in value of the operator modified tags. Does the emulator not run the programs?
 
The emulator does run programs, but won't do real data logging, or send emails.

I'm not sure if the watch window will show the calculated tags right or not for the emulator...I rarely use the watch window. Instead of the watch window, try putting the calculated tags on a display page temporarily to validate them.

When you use the Trigger and select Change in Value, for the value field right below it, you are supposed to put the amount of change that is required to cause the trigger, so for any change to an integer a value of 1 should work. Another way to call the program would be to use the "On Entry Complete" for the data box on the Entry Tab. The drawback to this is that it's not global, so you would need to do that for all occurrence of the tag where entry is allowed if there are more than one.

I just did a quick test using a Change in Value Trigger with a float and an integer tag and set the value to 0, set the action to Beep (on a real G09) and it worked, so a value of 0 should cause any change to trigger your program.

Make sure the program is translated. Make sure the calculated tag is set to internal, and not a constant or something that may not have read and write properties.
 
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When I put the calculated tags on the page it shows a gray dashed line. The calculated tags are linked to addresses in the PLC and I have disabled the PLC communications driver in the emulator. If I change one of the calculated tags to be write only instead of read/write, it displays a value of zero instead of the dashed line no matter what value I enter into the two tags involved in the calculation.
 
When I put the calculated tags on the page it shows a gray dashed line. The calculated tags are linked to addresses in the PLC and I have disabled the PLC communications driver in the emulator. If I change one of the calculated tags to be write only instead of read/write, it displays a value of zero instead of the dashed line no matter what value I enter into the two tags involved in the calculation.

Having it set to a Device address is probably the issue. You could try (temporarily) changing it to internal to see if the program is doing what you want. I believe that even disabling the Device communication, is going to result in the "n/a" or "----" when the device is not accessible and the HMI tries to read the tag value and finds out it can't. Setting it to write only might give you the expected result. I'd try switching it's source to internal temporarily and see if you still get zero.

Other things to consider are the data types of the values in the calculation...you can use int(Tag1) or float(Tag1) to force the data type conversion within an expression if that is what you need to do to get the math right.
 
Its an application that has been working for several years. It was originally a Kadet model HMI programmed with Crimson 2.0. That unit failed and the replacement is the G307K2 which required converting the project file to Crimson 3.0. There have been glitches reported in the operation of the machine using the new unit. I'm trying to verify that all the calculated values are correct.
The HMI communicates with both a MicroLogix1500 and an Ultra 3000 servo drive.
I also tried changing the calculated tag to internal with the same results as write only to a PLC address.
 
I think I have solved it. I moved one of the calculations into a new program all by itself and triggered that program instead. Once I did that I got a value in the calculated tag. Until I write values to all of the tags referenced in the program there will be divide by zero errors in the rest of the program for the calculated tags. Apparently the calculated tags don't get updated as they are calculated, only at the successful execution of the entire program.
Thanks for your help and your offer to take a look at the application.
Oh, BTW, the watch window gets updated just like the tag value displayed on the screen.
 
Hey! I have a question??
When I send (Shift + F9) to red lion emulator... it gives error "ERROR – Timeout waiting for reply frame."
I don't know what is wrong with it. Kindly, help me out
 

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