BRX Do-more Designer Troubleshooting from AutomationDirect

Do-more designer has a lot of tools you can use to debug and troubleshoot your programs. We’ll take a quick spin through them in this video, and point you towards other videos where you can learn more. The dashboard is a great place to look for issues because it shows you pretty much the entire system at a glance. For example, I see it’s reminding me that the firmware is not the latest version. How would I fix that? Just click on it and it takes you right to the dialog you need to see what your options are. This example says there is something wrong with the I/O system. How do you fix it? Just click on it and again it takes you to right where you need to go to figure it out. And that’s the key with the dashboard – if you see anything that looks out of place, all you have to do is click on it and Do-more Designer will walk you right down the path needed to solve the issue. Here’s a little test program for us to play with. The quickest way to see what’s going on is to click on all status. If I change the inputs on the PLC, then we see the results right on the screen which makes it super easy to visualize how power flows through the contacts and instructions. Keep in mind these are updated at the bottom of the scan – not during the scan. Dataviews are another quick way to quickly see what’s going on. You just put whatever you want to monitor here and with status on, you see the current values. You can monitor anything here, strings, structures, done bits, and any memory location in the entire system. You can also change values - press the edit button, enter a value and if you watch the current value while I hit the write button, sure enough it changes. Keep in mind that if you write to an input in the dataview, that’s going to get overwritten on the next scan making whatever you wrote go away. Same thing applies to any outputs the program is writing to. That’s easy to forget so keep that in mind. While you can’t change an input using the data view you CAN force it to do what you want. Suppose you need to ignore a certain input. That’s where forces come in handy. You can override any I/O point or memory value using this table, right clicking on an element or right clicking on a data view entry. By the way, did you know that if you are NOT I edit mode and you double click on a contact you can change its value right there? Or any value you want. That’s really great for those times when you just want to mess with one value and don’t want to brig up a whole dataview to do it. Just click on the value and hit the write button. Trend views monitor data so you can see how things change over time. You can change the scale and even pause the trending with this history button so you can scroll back in time and see the history of the data. To create a trend view you could push the trend view button and add items to it manually, but look at this. If you right click on an instruction you can just select trend and it automagically fills in the trend view for you. You can then add or remove items till your hearts content. Speaking of Trend Views, some instructions even have little mini trend views built in. Just turn on status to see it. If you have a program with lots of programs, or tasks and subroutines, expand those over here and if status is enabled, you will see which of them are currently in use. You can even see which stages of your stage program are active. I love this because at a glance I can see if I’m stuck in one stage or one routine or if a task is even being executed and how often. Do-more Designer has a built-in debugger. You just click on debug and you can now pause the program, issue just a single scan, multiple scans, manage suspended tasks, monitor the current scan time of the PLC, etc. There’s even PID overviews and viewing tools so you can monitor and adjust your PID loops. And don’t forget the simulator for debugging– it’s a great way to verify code independent of the hardware and it has a built in PID simulator too! To learn more about any of these debugging and troubleshooting tools, go to the start page, and click on the Video Browser tool. You can type any topic you want here, or select a category here and even expand the search to include all related videos. You can then watch the video right now or download it so you can watch it later in places where you don’t have internet access. Having all of these video tutorials instantly available is one of my favorite features of Do-more Designer. That’s a pretty good summary of the troubleshooting tools you have at your finger tips with Do-more Designer. If you need any help with any of these remember that pressing the F1 key from pretty much any place in Do-more designer will bring up context sensitive help. If you are in the dataview and hit F1 – you get data view help. If you are over an instruction and press F1 you get the instruction help. If you in the trend view and press F1 – what do you get? Trend view help. You get the idea. If you need even more help with your Do-more program, please contact AutomationDirect’s free award winning support team during regular business hours. They will be happy to help. And don’t forget the forums – there are lots of experienced automation professionals there that love to share their years of experience. Just don’t post any questions directed at AutomationDirect’s support team there, they don’t monitor the forums on a regular basis. Spend Less. Do More. With AutomationDirect.