I’m playing with the latest Ignition to see, what’s possible to do with it.
I’m in automation business for over 25 years and I have been dealing with numerous SCADA systems and PLC programming over these years. Last few (like 10) years I’m mainly on SIEMENS SIMATIC STEP7 PLC and WinCC.
What I’m struggling with in Ignition is, how to define alarms.
In all other SCADA systems, that I have worked with, you must first define some tags and then alarms (for discrete/digital alarms). I have always defined tags in form of words - 16 bit (or double words - 32 bit). That’s because when you have for example 500 alarms (and warnings) you don’t need to define 500 tags; only 32 tags (16 - bit tags) or 16 tags (32 - bit tags).
Then, in the alarm manager, you define your alarm texts and you can assign to each alarm (text) the bit of the tag, for which you want the alarm. For example:
- In tags I defined MW100 (merker-flag word 100, which has 16 bits: from M100.0 to M101.7, in Siemens PLC).
- In alarm manager I assign to first alarm tag MW100 and bit 0 (that’s M100.0), to second alarm MW100 and bit 1 (M100.1), to third alarm tag MW100 and bit 2 (that’s M100.2),… and to the 16’th alarm tag MW100 and bit 15 (that’s M101.7).
Now, in Ignition, I can’t find the way to do that…
I know, that I can make all 500 tags as Boolean and define for each tag Alerting properties, but that’s to much… Why would you have 500 tags, if you can have 32 (16 bit) tags ( or 16 (32 bit) tags)…
I refuse to believe, that such great product, like Ignition, doesn’t have that option…
Can somebody point me to the right direction?
Regards from sLOVEnia
EDIT: I (soft of) find a way… with the help of others in this thread.
See my last post…