C-more Micro HMI Bottling Plant 8: Alarm Screen from AutomationDirect

Shift F5 brings up the alarm screen. This is a demo screen that shows us the things you can do when an alarm is detected. An alarm is just a TAG that the C-More Micro Panel is monitoring. If that TAG meets the conditions set, the C-More Micro reacts. In this example we can set the alarm by clicking on F5 or this little Alrm icon right here. When we do that we get a flashing screen, a text message across the top of the screen, and alarm tone and a flashing LED. Let’s turn that OFF… This is screen 6 - Let’s go take a look at that and see how to set it up. This graphic is a dynamic bitmap that only appears when the “LOCK” TAG is active. The way you do that is you only specify a Bitmap for the ON state and leave the off state bitmap blank! These are all just static text blocks – the alarm, this big pump failure message, and even this little note here. This is a static bitmap placed on top of a regular pushbutton – that creates a graphic push button. Note that we can either move the graphic out of the way to get acces to the pushbutton, OR we can simply push it to the bottom. The push button simply sets the Alarm TAG and also sets up F5 to do the same thing. When we are done, just send the pushbutton back to the bottom of the stack so we can see the bitmap again. Now that the screen is setup, we need to setup the alarms. Do that here under the navigation windows Function Tab – Alarm Control Setup OR here under the setup menus Alarm Control Setup. In this dialog we can create up to 16different alarm conditions. We just select the TAG to generate the alarm – we’ll grab one out of our database here - Select the state that generates the alarm – on or off in this case for this discrete TAG - and then just enable the options you want: You can turn on the Beeps, You can have the LED blink on any function key you want, you can have the backlight turn on to any color you want, or you can have it blink between that color or another color. You can even have a banner message appear at the top. One note – the alarm tag doesn’t have to be a discrete type. If we choose a numeric type – let’s go find something that is not a discrete, here’s this V6000 TAG – notice that this changes from ON/OFF to conditions – so the alarm is visible when it is equal to a zero, not equal to, greater than, greater than or equal to, etc. You can choose any value you want, any condition you want, for a numeric TAG. Otherwise, everything else is the same. So, let’s go back to our example – I’m not going to use that TAG we just created – let’s look at the TAG that is already here. The “ALARM” TAG – when it is set to ON, we should get beeps, we should see an LED blinking on F5, we should see the backlight turn amber, and then blink between amber and yellow, and we should see a banner message appear across the top. Let’s go take a look at the simulator to see all of that come together. F5 toggles this alarm TAG down on the PLC to ON. When that happens, the screen blinks between yellow and amber, we get a message appearing across the top of the screen, we hear the beeps going, and we see the LED flashing on F5. Let’s quite that down. And Finally, when the PLC sets the LOCK TAG … the warning graphic appears on the screen. 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