C-more Micro HMI Alarm Setup from AutomationDirect

The C-More Micro panel can be setup to generate several kinds of alarm signals: beeps, blinking screen colors, Blinking LEDs down here on the function keys and even flashing banner messages cross the top of the screen all in response to your alarms. Let’s see how to set this up. You configure Alarms in the Alarm Control Setup Dialog under the Navigation Windows FUNCTION Tab: Alarm Control Setup here or under the Setup Menu: Alarm Control Setup. Select the TAG you want to assign alarm conditions to –Lets grab this Pressure TAG. And because the Pressure TAG is a numeric type, so we need to enter the value when an error occurs. Let’s say this one is an alarm when the Pressure is greater than 150 psi. What do I want it to do when that happens? Let’s have that alarm condition fire off some beeps and toggle the backlight between a yellow and red color. For the Temperature tag, let’s generate an alarm when the temperature gets above 200 degrees. And when it does alarm, let’s have it just generate a banner message – how about “ >> TOO HOT <<” And let’s do one more. Let’s grab this FAULT Tag, which is a discrete type, so now we have to tell it is an alarm when it is in the ON or the OFF state. Let’s make this one alarm when it is ON. And when that does happen, let’s do EVERYTHING. We’re going to beep, We’re going to blink an LED – let’s say F5 in this example, we’re going to toggle the backlight between yellow and orange, and we’ll put out a banner message across the top of the screen that says “SYSTEM FAULT”. Once you have all of your alarm conditions defined the way you want them, Hit OK. We’re not going to add any buttons here, we’ll just manually force the alarms for this example. So, let’s go straight to the simulator, Save the project. And up pops our alarms demo. Again, we have no controls here, so we’ll just go over to the control window and force these alarms. So let’s see, when the pressure went above 150 psi, we’re supposed to get an alarm so let’s make it 151. And,sure enough we get our blinking screens and our beeps. By the way, pressing a function key silences the beeps, but the alarms don’t go away until the fault condition is taken care of. We are also supposed to get alarms when the Temperature goes above 200 degrees, we’ll choose 201, and in this case we get our simple banner message, left justified, flashing across the top of the screen. It will stay there until the alarm condition goes away. Finally, our FAULT condition – when the C-More Micro see this TAG switch to ON, all four things happen, we get Beeps, Flashing LEDs, blinking screen colors and the message across the top of the screen. Again, pressing any function key will silence the alarms, but the alarm condition is still there until this fault goes away. One final note on Alarm Priority – let’s go back to our alarm setup screen and take a look at this - if multiple alarms are active at the same time, the highest priority alarm will be issued – the alarms are shown in this dialog in priority order. This is the highest priority alarm, this is the next highest … this is the next priority. You are allowed to setup 16 alarms and the top one in this list will be your highest priority alarm. If all three of these fired off at the same time, you would get these alarms until that condition went away. Then you would get these alarms until that condition went away, and finally you would get these alarms until that condition went away. Suppose we want the FAULT to be the highest priority alarm. You just click on the FAULT alarm and click on the UP button to push it to the top of the list. So by using UP and DOWN you can move alarms around on that priority list. Note that you can also quickly change conditions without having to go back into each individual one – you can just turn them on and off right here within the dialog. That’s all there is to setting up Alarms – be sure to check out the other videos in this series. And as always, please send us any topics you would like to see covered – or - any other comments for that matter – we appreciate the feedback!