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Feature Description

Alarms communicate and document when adverse situations occur in a program. Alarms can have set values or threshold conditions that trigger their occurrence. They signal situations like the breakdown, malfunction, and reach of set limits. Documentation of alarm contents like timestamp, description, and value is critical for applications. This can be done via CSV generation on the user’s Xpanel with Script Functions. The Alarm Summary is a runtime GUI object that displays all active, acknowledged, and resolved alarms. Alarms can be organized in Groups and Levels which can be displayed in an Alarm Summary object. When alarms change state, Actions can be added to control operations in the project. Alarms can be configured to track digital values or have analog thresholds (i.e., High High, High, Low, and Low Low). For more details on alarm configuration, please visit Alarm Information to learn more.

Designer Functionalities

Alarm Editor

Click Tools > Alarm Editor to bring up the Alarm Editor window, as shown to the right:

This pane shows all created alarms and their designated names, triggers, comparisons, comparison values, and labels. From this window, users can create, delete, edit, copy, paste, and cut alarms.

Checking Persist Alarm Status enables the Xpanel to retain alarm data through the closure of project runtime. Even through the loss of power, alarm statuses remain unchanged.

Edit Alarm

In the Alarm Editor window, click the + icon to bring up the Edit Alarm window:

This window contains the Alarm Settings, Labels, and Descriptions tab that users can customize for created alarms.

Alarm Settings

In the Alarm Settings tab of Edit Alarm, users can change the Alarm Name, Trigger, Comparison, and Value fields. Action options for ON, OFF, and Acknowledge are also changeable on this page.

Each new alarm must have a trigger and value set before being able to be created. This is the condition in which the alarm will check to become active. An alarm can be triggered by different situations, like a tag reaching a value between or outside set limits, two tags being compared, or the value of a Boolean tag changing. Expressions can also be used as part of the condition as well. By double-clicking the trigger field or left-clicking the chain-link icon next to the field, a pop-up window will open where a tag can be selected. This tag may be formatted to be compared and used as a trigger, as shown by the second image on the right:

Labels

The Labels tab allows users to change groups and levels for alarm organization. There are two default scopes to select from: group and level. Additional labels and scopes can be created by clicking the Edit Labels button. One alarm may have multiple group and level labels, and various alarms can have the same label. On the first picture shown on the right, Groups or Levels can be assigned to an alarm by simply left-clicking the already created label:

After clicking the Edit Labels button, new scopes and labels can be added with the + icon. To edit an already created label, simply double-click the desired one. The second image on the right shows the Edit Labels window and the pop-up shown when creating or editing a label:

Alarm Notifications

The user can set up notifications via labels. While creating or editing a label, there will be a checkbox named “Notify”, shown to the right:

When clicked, any alarm with that label attached will send a notification to an Alarm Summary object when activated. This notification will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Another way to achieve this is to insert a command on an alarm Action. When the command “Send Screen Notification” is selected, the user may specify the message sent via the notification at the bottom of the screen.

Descriptions

On the Descriptions tab, clicking New Description allows the user to create comments that can be assigned to alarms and will appear on Alarm Summary objects.

Descriptions are tag expressions that are evaluated at the moment of the tag trigger. Descriptions can be used as interest tags.

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Alarm Actions

Based on the types of alarms, such as Active Alarms, Historical Alarms, and Shelved Alarms, a user can trigger other actions in the program. In the Alarm Settings tab of the Edit Alarm window, the user can select the event of the alarm to which an action will be added under the Action Options. The ON Action will trigger an action when the alarm comparison becomes true, the OFF Action will trigger an action when the alarm comparison becomes false from being true, and the Acknowledge Action will trigger an action when the user acknowledges the alarm.

Runtime Functionalities

CSV Generation

The user can export past alarm data to a CSV for record keeping. The user can transfer data to a USB, SD card, or File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

A CSV file can be created in two ways: creating a command set to “Save Alarm CSV” or creating a script that calls either of two functions: alarm.createCsv(String label, enum storageType) or alarm.createAllCsv(enum storageType). The user can specify the storage location and labels to be saved.

An example of what the CSV file would look like after generation is shown on the far right:


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