I just got back from my first ever Honeywell course (we also use Honeywell,
and my boss finally asked me to learn it), and I really like some of their
system status displays, so I attempted to duplicate one of them on the I/A.
After a few days development, I have come up with this:
A graphical display of all the FBM's in a given CP, area, unit, whatever.
Each FBM on the display is represented by its letterbug. Clicking on the
letterbug runs a script file which creates a substitution list and then
calls up a re-useable display that gets filled in by the script with all the
configured I/O blocks on that FBM. On the re-useable display you get the
block name, description and current value of each block on that FBM, with
the current value in background text so you can see if it is BADIO or not.
You can click on each block name to call up a standard detail display for
each block.
It's not completely real-time like Honeywell, because I couldn't figure a
way to extract blocks in real-time given the FBM letterbug. What I did was
write another script that creates the "master list" of all I/O blocks in the
system with their IOM_ID's and PNT_NO's which takes about 30 minutes to run
using "getpars" and "omgetimp" calls. You could use FoxAPI unbuffered reads
too, I suppose. The substitution list script then greps out the FBM
letterbug from the "master I/O list". The idea is that you run the "master
I/O list" script once a day or once a week using crontab, since you don't
normally add I/O points very often anyway. You could run it on demand also.
The whole scheme is kind of kludgy, but it works and I think will be very
useful around here. You could use it to see if a given FBM has any spare
points or to see what's on an FBM if it goes bad. It's also nice just to
monitor an FBM to see how the points on it are doing.
If anyone wants to see the scripts and displays, I would be happy to provide
them. The current version supports AIN, AINR, AOUT, AOUTR, CIN, COUT, GDEV,
and DPIDA, because that is all we have here. You could add other I/O blocks
easily enough. I also would love to hear any better ways to accomplish what
I tried to do, especially ways to make it more real-time, and any other
system status displays that people have come up with.
Tim
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