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 shown 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

    • Alarm Banner Properties

  • Edit Alarm

    • Alarm Settings

    • Labels

    • Descriptions

  • Alarm Actions

• Runtime Functionalities

  • CSV Generation

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, labels, and banner functionality. Users can create, delete, edit, copy, paste, and cut alarms from this window.

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.

The user can set up an Alarm Banner that will appear at the bottom of the screen and scroll or cycle through any active alarms. In the Alarm Editor window, click Alarm Banner to open the Alarm Banner Properties window and select Enable Banner.

Alarm Banner Properties allows users to change the color of the banner and text, time format, display order, ability to open a page, and scrolling functionality, as well as see a preview. If a page is selected under the Go to page: field, tapping anywhere on the banner will open the selected page, where an Alarm Summary object can be shown to display all active, shelved, and historical alarms.

To add alarms to the banner, select the Display in Banner option when creating or editing an alarm or label.

When selected, any alarm, or alarm under a label, with the option selected will display on the Alarm Banner when active.

A way to achieve a similar function as 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.

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.

In the Alarm Settings tab of Edit Alarm, users can change the Alarm Name, Trigger, Comparison, Value, and Display in Banner fields. Action options and email notifications 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 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. By double-clicking the Trigger field or left-clicking the chain-link icon next to the field, the Binding Properties 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.

Another way to set conditions is by using expressions. The available expressions consist of scaling a tag value, using a Boolean value, or a condition map, and users are also allowed to create custom expressions. These conditions can be set by clicking on the Expression tab inside the Binding Properties window.

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. Groups or Levels can be selected by left-clicking the already created label and de-selected by clicking the x icon next to a selected label. An example of selected labels and the icon to de-select them is shown in the first picture on the right:

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

On the Descriptions tab, clicking New Description allows users to create tag expressions for the current alarm. Tag expressions are descriptions that can be added in a new column of an Alarm Summary object and will also show in an Alarm CSV generated file. Descriptions will be numbered and can be re-ordered after creation. They will be part of the alarm row when the corresponding alarm is triggered. This is similar to how interest tags are displayed in Xpanel Designer, but a description will be shown here instead of a tag value.

Users can trigger actions in the program based on alarm statuses. 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.

Email notifications are configurable for the same triggers and can have created descriptions added to them.

The user can export past alarm data to a CSV for record keeping. The user can transfer data to a separate device via USB, SD card, or File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or to local memory* on Linux Xpanel.

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: