Crimson 3.x Alarms and Events

Abstract:

This document describes utilizing Alarms and Events in Crimson®.

Products:

Red Lion Controls CR1000 Human Machine Interface (HMI), CR3000 HMI, Data Station Plus (DSPSX/GT/ZR), G3 HMI, G3 Kadet HMI, Graphite® Controller (GC), Graphite HMI, Modular Controller (MC), and ProducTVity Station™ (PTV), FlexEdge Series (DA50A/DA70A Software Group 3 or higher), DataStation(DA30D)

Use Case:

Creating and utilizing numerical based alarms and events. 

Required Software:

Crimson 3.0, Crimson 3.1, or Crimson 3.2 

Introduction

Crimson's display functionality has a built-in alarm system directly tied to each data tag that exists in the system. Numeric tags and flag tags mapped or internal support alarms and events to report issues and call actions. Crimson has built-in alarm management objects called alarm viewer primitive, as well as an event viewer primitive for historical purposes. 

Creating Data Tag Alarms

Note: Only data tags have an alarm tab feature so either mapped or internal tags must be used. 

Go to your data tags section, create a new tag or find an existing tag to use. Click on that tag and look in the center window. Click on the Alarm tab. 

Under the alarm tab, you will see that each tag offers two alarms that you can configure per tag. Set the Event mode to which ever trigger mode for your alarm will be. Flag tags and numeric tags have different event modes. 

Flag Tags Event Modes:

Numeric Tag Event Modes:

Select your appropriate event mode for your particular tag. For example-purposes, this tech note will select Active ON for the flag tag and Absolute High for the numeric tag. 

Alarm Settings for Flag and Numeric tags: 

Event Name - The title of the alarm or description 

Enable - Set via an expression or tag to enable or disable this alarm from occurring even if the condition for it is true 

Value - defines either the absolute value at which the alarm will be activated, the
deviation from the setpoint value or the change in value that must occur since the alarm last
triggered. The exact interpretation depends on the event mode as described above.

Hysteresis - used to prevent an alarm from oscillating between the on and off
states when the process is near the alarm condition. For example, for an absolute high alarm,
the alarm will become active when the tag exceeds the alarm’s value, but will only deactivate
when the tag falls below the value by an amount greater than or equal to the alarm’s
hysteresis. Remember that the property always acts to maintain an alarm once the alarm is
activated, and not to modify the point at which the activation occurs.

Trigger - is used to indicate whether the alarm should be edge or level triggered. In
the former case, the alarm will trigger when the condition specified by the event mode first
becomes true. In the latter case, the alarm will remain in the active state while the condition
persists. This property can also be used to indicate that this alarm should be used as an event
only. In this case, the alarm will be edge triggered, but will not result in an alarm condition.
Rather, an event will be logged to internal memory and optionally to the memory card.

Delay - used to indicate how long the alarm condition must exist before the
alarm will become active. In the case of an edge triggered alarm or event, this property also
specifies the amount of time for which the alarm condition must no longer exist before
subsequent reactivations will result in a further alarm being signaled. As an example, if an
alarm is set to activate when a speed switch indicates that a motor is not running even when
the motor has been requested to start; this property can be used to provide the motor with
time to run-up before the alarm is activated.

Accept - used to indicate whether the user will be required to explicitly accept
an alarm before it will no longer be displayed. Edge triggered alarms must always be manually
accepted.

Priority - used to control the order in which alarms are displayed by Crimson’s
alarm viewer. The lower the numerical value of the priority field, the nearer to the top the
alarm will be displayed.

Viewing Group - used to indicate into which group this alarm should be included when
viewed in the Alarm Viewer or Alarm Ticker primitives. A setting of Default will cause the primitive
viewing group to be ignored.

Mail To - specifies the email address book entry to which a message should be
sent when this alarm is activated. Refer to the Using Services chapter for information on
configuring email.

The On Accept, On Active, On Clear and On Event properties are used to specify actions to be
executed when the change of state of the alarm occurs. Not all actions will be available, depending on the
alarm’s trigger mode and accept type.

Display alarms in the Alarm Viewer, Ticker, and Event Viewer Primitives

All alarms in the system when active will show up in the Alarm Viewer, Alarm Ticker, and Event Viewer. You can find these primitives located in the display pages section under System Primitives.  

Find the Alarm Viewer, Alarm Ticker, and Event Viewer and drag and drop them to a page.

The Alarm Viewer, Alarm Ticker, and Event Viewer primitives are all plug and play that will display created alarms as a default object without making changes to them after putting them onto a page. See Crimson 3.X manual to learn more on the individual settings of each alarm primitive. In Crimson click Help then select Contents to pull up the manual. 

Filter Alarms by Group

The Crimson Alarm Viewer Primitive now has the ability to filter alarms by the viewing group setting on each alarm tag setup mentioned above in this technote. Any tag alarms that have an assigned viewing group can be displayed by their group in individual grouped alarm viewer primitives.