defcon.klaxon
Lifetime Supporting Member
Hi guys,
I've recently taken some Wonderware (Archestra/InTouch) training and it really helped to understand how they envision development happens. Unfortunately because there was so much to go through, we couldn't get in depth with some of the topics and one of them was how alarms properly work. We did some labs, but we weren't able to drill down to understand all the facets of the alarm system so I have a few questions I'm hoping you all can help me with.
So let's say my PLC has several digital outputs for alarms...say, for a well pump control, there is motor overload, moisture, and high temp (on if condition is true, off if condition is false). I'd create a tag in InTouch for each alarm and then link them to the PLC data, easy enough. But let's say I want an alarm indicator to turn red and blink when each alarm is active, stop blinking but stay red when acknowledged (but alarm condition is still present), and turn off when alarm condition is not present and any previous alarm has been acknowledged...how would one do that? Because the alarm is discrete, it only has two values, true or false. So how can I tell if the alarm condition is still present, but the alarm has been acknowledged?
This is where the training kind of left off...we used dot fields and alarm groups for the example labs, and for analog values like a tank level, it sort of made sense...for a tank level we used tanklevel.hilimit and tanklevel.lolimit to light up some indicators, but the actual alarm fields are "low" and "high" and there's no "limit" verbiage when actually setting up the alarm so it's kind of confusing where these "magic dot fields" actually came from. My guess is that there are a lot of dot fields that I'm not even aware of, and maybe there's an ack'ed or unack'ed field for alarms? When I've looked around for more info, the sheer volume of InTouch documentation is pretty overwhelming.
Anyway, that's what I'm wrestling with at the moment and if anyone can provide some insight, that'd be greatly appreciated.
I've recently taken some Wonderware (Archestra/InTouch) training and it really helped to understand how they envision development happens. Unfortunately because there was so much to go through, we couldn't get in depth with some of the topics and one of them was how alarms properly work. We did some labs, but we weren't able to drill down to understand all the facets of the alarm system so I have a few questions I'm hoping you all can help me with.
So let's say my PLC has several digital outputs for alarms...say, for a well pump control, there is motor overload, moisture, and high temp (on if condition is true, off if condition is false). I'd create a tag in InTouch for each alarm and then link them to the PLC data, easy enough. But let's say I want an alarm indicator to turn red and blink when each alarm is active, stop blinking but stay red when acknowledged (but alarm condition is still present), and turn off when alarm condition is not present and any previous alarm has been acknowledged...how would one do that? Because the alarm is discrete, it only has two values, true or false. So how can I tell if the alarm condition is still present, but the alarm has been acknowledged?
This is where the training kind of left off...we used dot fields and alarm groups for the example labs, and for analog values like a tank level, it sort of made sense...for a tank level we used tanklevel.hilimit and tanklevel.lolimit to light up some indicators, but the actual alarm fields are "low" and "high" and there's no "limit" verbiage when actually setting up the alarm so it's kind of confusing where these "magic dot fields" actually came from. My guess is that there are a lot of dot fields that I'm not even aware of, and maybe there's an ack'ed or unack'ed field for alarms? When I've looked around for more info, the sheer volume of InTouch documentation is pretty overwhelming.
Anyway, that's what I'm wrestling with at the moment and if anyone can provide some insight, that'd be greatly appreciated.