AngryRobot

Interfacing Union to NA alarm expression.

6 posts in this topic

I have a union that I am using for my faults, but when I attempt to set the NA alarm expression to the union BOOL I get a compile error.  The union is an array of 64 BOOL and a long word.

I assume the NA can't process the array portion?  IE: FLT.Bit[0]  

Is there any work around to this?  I hate going back to using standard tags, because then there isn't an easy way for me to identify if an alarm is active (so I have to use a bunch of contacts in parallel)- that or just write a value to an INT and lose the ability to show multiple alarms. 

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Hi,

I dont know if this answers your question... but maybe you can manage by having an array of bool, where each element is an alarm, and just use a for loop to check if any of the bits in the array is true. A bad thing about this would be that the code is not self explained since you have to know what array index corresponds to different alarms.

Another approach could be to create your own struct with boolean members (one for each alarm). And then make a check if any of the bits in the struct is true. I attached a picture showing how that could be made.

alarmBitStructCheck.png

Edited by Solheim95
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Solheim95,  I played around a bit with your second example and made a function block that handles all of it, and then nested that function block inside of another one that handles a lot of machine status and common logic.  It works perfectly!

Thank you!

 

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I had no problem creating the Union in the controller and then creating the same union in the HMI.

Created Union in the controller:

5b1a9c478f9d0_controlleruniondef.jpg.b5e

Created global variable in controller:

5b1a9c470a630_controllerglobal.jpg.959e2

Created Union in the HMI:

5b1a9c44f0e9c_HMIUnion.jpg.d14d6a19328e2

Created variable in HMI:

5b1a9c4689441_HMIGlobal.jpg.fa988cd9249d

Mapped the variables together in in the variable map (in HMI):

5b1a9c4472fde_HMIvarmap.jpg.10d6e1fb7072

Used the bit level function on a screen (note that it uses parentheses, not brackets):

5b1a9c460f444_Unionbitj.pg.thumb.jpg.d2d

Used the LWORD (ULONG) variable for a display:

5b1a9c4571434_unionworddisplay.thumb.jpg

It builds without any errors.

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I didn't realize to specify arrays on the NA you had to parentheses instead of brackets... that is most likely the cause of my problems.  When I tried to specify ".BitLeve[0]" in the user alarm setup, that is what was causing the compile error.

Well, using  Solheim9's solution I've already finished programming the alarm section, and I don't want to spend the time going back and changing all of my outputs now.  At least I know for the future.

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All Array index accessor in the NA usese parentheses since it's based on Visual Basic script.
I really hope they used C# for a better script consistency with PLCs ST Language, but I guess VB is easier for most users :(

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