Home / FactoryTalk Optix / Alarms, Trending, and Data Loggers
Description
Version 1.5 release of FactoryTalk Optix brings support for Logix Alarms. This video shows how to use the new Logix Alarm Widget in the FactoryTalk Optix v1.5 release.
Software used for the demonstration:
Studio 5000 v37
FactoryTalk Logix Echo v3.01
FactoryTalk Optix Studio v1.5
Transcript
(00:01) this video I’d like to show one of the other new features in Optics version 1.5 and that is the logic’s tag based alarms and the alarm widget that is now available in Factor talk Optics so version 1.5 came out towards the end of October 2024 and um if we look at the uh release notes from version 1.
(00:28) 5 we see that under data connectivity uh brought in the support for Logics alarms and extended tag properties in a previous video I show how the extended tag properties you know work this video we’ll talk about the the logic’s tag based alarms so just to kind of go through the the setup briefly um I have a a Logics uh control LS application running Studio 5000 here uh is a and I’m using Factory talk Logics Echo just as the emulated L8 controller um for the in for the uh extended tag properties uh video i’ had made two udts or user defined data types
(01:17) um called t or made a UDT called tank and put two instances of that UDT tank one and tank 2 um in the in the project and for the extended tank property video just simply read some of those extended tag properties and used them inside of Optics but what I’ve also done is I went ahead and created some some tag based alarms for a couple of these variables in the UDT uh specifically for the level and the temperature so if I go to um if I go to the alarms uh we can see we have some alarms created for tank one tank two we have
(01:59) some high and some high High alarms based on uh the level and on the temperature and we have some you know some limits defined and you know an alarm message and even an alarm grouping right so this is really all I had to do I created the tags I you know gave uh you know defined them as alarms or defined alarm points for those tags and um that was it uh again tag based alarms so I’m not running any kind of um you know code to have to do this I’m not using the alarm blocks that would be available in the uh in the programming
(02:40) languages now when we come to to Optics um you know the key is one we’re using version 1.5 which is the latest version and I’ve already kind of you know had a bit of an application going from the extended tag property video and I’d already kind of um imported in my tags and created um a driver and a station one thing I want to show before we go um any further is that when I did create my con driver and I created a station here uh for logic Echo as the CPU name um I do have to make sure that I have the use alarms enabled or set the true uh this
(03:22) will be false most likely by default so if that’s not true then we’re not going to be able to um subscribe to those alarms here within Optics so the other piece of this as far as a setup goes is that um we need to actually bring in the alarm widgets that have been added and bring them into the project so those alarm widgets are actually available in the library so if we open up the library and we search for alarm widgets we’re going to get this folder uh component here this this folder called alarm widgets all we got to do is
(04:02) take this folder and drag it into the application I’m going to drag it to the UI folder because it’s going to create um the arm widgets folder here underneath UI right so here’s our alarm widgets and we get two widgets that uh bring come into his uh alarm manager and alarm summary for a little bit of documentation on those two you could go to the help file built into Optics there’s a little bit of a section here on the alarm widgets and the alarm summary um versus the alarm manager so you can read to help and learn a little
(04:47) bit more about each widget so I go ahead and close this Library so all I got to do next is basically create a screen and drop the uh alarm summary or alarm manager widget on that screen so I’m going to uh right click on screens say new screen and I’m going to call this alarms um since I have the the main window up with the navigation I’m going to go ahead and drag this alarms to the navigation bar so that I can actually access this this um screen here in a few moments going to double click on alarms screen that opens up the screen which is
(05:30) blank of course and then to add the alarm manager or alarm summary widget I can simply right click on the screen name say new and when I do that the alarm widgets are now shown as an option and I can choose either manager or summary I’m go ahead and choose summary and put that right there I’m going to um kind of bring this up a little bit and what I’m going to do two is I’m going to go back to my tank one screen and I just want to copy and paste these um these uh bar graphs or the uh the sliders and I’m going to put those onto
(06:19) the um alarms page so that I can change my values without having to go back and forth all right and that is actually all I have to do there’s no additional configuration needed for this alarm summary um if I click on it there are some properties of course that we can you know tweak and and and uh further Define if we want but as far as having to link this to any other you know thing inside of Optics doesn’t doesn’t have to be done so uh at this point we can go ahead and start the emulator and this will take just a moment for
(07:05) this first time um since we have this uh [Music] alarm uh summary going on there okay so uh here was my um you know tank one screen if I now click on the alarm screen we see that we’ get we basically pulled in alarms already um into the system showing uh um you know priority status um you know the event time the name uh and the message that we defined back in the um in the controller for the tag based alarm so if we you know slide these values up we can get to our our alarm Point triggers right um if we if we’re kind of missing something here we
(07:51) can click on the on the buttons and we can you know turn on or turn off some of these uh columns right for instance the alarm state was not showing there severity it wasn’t showing right so we can show that type of stuff uh we can filter the alarms I only have you know just a small amount of alarms here but if you have a lot of alarms you can you can run a filter to um to try to find the alarm you’re looking for other thing we do is um by double clicking on this alarm oh no take that back um if I if I click view sorry about that
(08:34) so um if you highlight the alarm and then click view you can get some additional uh you know details on the alarm now this window is kind of popping up rather large for me I can try to expand the emulator and it’ll show this a little bit better right I have my emulator or I have my project set to stretch so when I when I went ahead and expanded the window uh the the alarm table did stretch out um to fill the to fill the uh the screen but the details of the alarm can be um can be looked at here as well all right so that was it um this uh
(09:13) again is a feature in the latest version 1.5 I know that uh you know this is kind of you know step one for the alarm widget I know they’re going to continue to kind of work and enhance this alarm widget further and in some upcoming releases um but uh very simple to use um to just basically bring in that that alarm widget folder from the library and then you can simply use that as summary or the manager widget to quickly display your logic’s tag based alarms