Hi there,
I have an app I am working on that uses radio communications to remote tank level monitoring equipment. I am using a RedLion DSP GT with a custom webpage to view the data and input some parameters for doing volume calculations. Its becoming a very large project!
Our serial communications must poll remote devices periodically rather than constantly and I have been able to get this to work - just without decent feedback about communications quality. Using an alarm trigger and a complex script I am able to specify a polling interval and turn the communications for a device on when the "next poll time" is less than the current time and then update the next poll time. Problem with this method is it is hard to determine if the communications are good as their status is almost always in a "bad" state. If I control communications with a script how do I check to see if the communication state is good when the communications are on? Should I be using a different method of polling the remote devices? I just noticed on gateway blocks there is some block control that does not seem to be documented in the manual.
A second problem popped up when using a gateway block to get the numbers out of the remote units. It appears that gateway blocks can only get signed integers, not unsigned. My app requires these numbers to be unsigned integers. I have tried a mapped tag and that is fine but the number is junk when the comms for that device are turned off. Is there a better way to do this as well?
Thanks, Dustin
I have an app I am working on that uses radio communications to remote tank level monitoring equipment. I am using a RedLion DSP GT with a custom webpage to view the data and input some parameters for doing volume calculations. Its becoming a very large project!
Our serial communications must poll remote devices periodically rather than constantly and I have been able to get this to work - just without decent feedback about communications quality. Using an alarm trigger and a complex script I am able to specify a polling interval and turn the communications for a device on when the "next poll time" is less than the current time and then update the next poll time. Problem with this method is it is hard to determine if the communications are good as their status is almost always in a "bad" state. If I control communications with a script how do I check to see if the communication state is good when the communications are on? Should I be using a different method of polling the remote devices? I just noticed on gateway blocks there is some block control that does not seem to be documented in the manual.
A second problem popped up when using a gateway block to get the numbers out of the remote units. It appears that gateway blocks can only get signed integers, not unsigned. My app requires these numbers to be unsigned integers. I have tried a mapped tag and that is fine but the number is junk when the comms for that device are turned off. Is there a better way to do this as well?
Thanks, Dustin
