C-More alternatives?

[ATU]

The built in Alarming for Cmore has always been primitive. If I use a Cmore or Micro, I have my own alarming screen and logic. I have complained about that.

[Controls Guy]

Good point.   I hardly ever use any built-in alarming (sometimes not even logging) in any HMI, because if you do it in the PLC it's much more flexible.

[Scot]

How do you get the alarms to show on the screen when they occur?
I suppose I could trigger a lookup text box at the bottom of the screen. But with multiple PLCs that could simultaneously trigger alarms, that could be a problem.

[Controls Guy]

I haven't tried it with multiple PLCs running to the same HMI, but I typically either jump (under direction of PLC logic) to a popup or full screen alarm or change the main ops screen background color to something alarming like red, or light up an indicator that says "Alarms exist" and let them jump to the alarm screen when they want to.

[ATU]

You know it might be better to pick one PLC as the Alarm Master. Route all alarms via Peerlink to that one PLC and then have one contiguous set of registers to map the Alarm bits to the HMI. That should cut down the amount of transactions that the HMI has to deal with.

[Scot]

I'll try that first. I wasn't too sure how intelligent the HMI is about grouping contiguous memory locations when polling. They're already communicating with Peerlink anyway.
Otherwise, it's going to be quite a chore inventing an alarm history screen.

[Scot]

Wish I knew how intelligent C-More's protocol driver is.
If I use bits in D-double words for alarms, it would be nice if the C-More just read the block of D values once to compare the bits.

[BobO]

The Do-more native status comm function is random access and can read over 160 items per transaction. The symbolic function is dependent on the length of the element name, but can do a bunch also. Get a Wireshark trace.

[Controls Guy]

The Do-more native status comm function is random access and can read over 160 items per transaction. The symbolic function is dependent on the length of the element name, but can do a bunch also. Get a Wireshark trace.

How do you get a Wireshark trace when neither endpoint is a PC?   Mirroring switch?

[Bolt]

The Do-more native status comm function is random access and can read over 160 items per transaction. The symbolic function is dependent on the length of the element name, but can do a bunch also. Get a Wireshark trace.

How do you get a Wireshark trace when neither endpoint is a PC?   Mirroring switch?

Yes, I believe so.  Better talk to plant IT!

[BobO]

How do you get a Wireshark trace when neither endpoint is a PC?   Mirroring switch?

Precisely.

Some higher end managed switches can also pull traffic from a particular port, but low cost mirroring switches work fine.

[ATU]

Netgear ProSafe Plus has mirroring. Easy Peazy to setup. I carry a 5 port around just for Wireshark. I think they are around $75

[BobO]

Netgear ProSafe Plus has mirroring. Easy Peazy to setup. I carry a 5 port around just for Wireshark. I think they are around $75

That's what I use.