Charms Diag Health Status

DeltaV 13.3.1

We had a power blip today and we experienced some odd behavior related to Charms IO. The IO is part of a redundant CIOC setup, with 6 terminal bases in series and 2 more mounted to the right connected via extension cables. 

It affected two different DeltaV systems with the only common tie was the power blip. 

Scenario one:One CIOC driving solely analog outputs, showed healthy on the CIOC comms as well as redundant health. All 6 Charms terminal bases in the field showed a red/green blinking light on the analog output Charms modules. Guessing the flash frequency was about 2 secs.  All the channels showed bad on diag with yellow question mark and associated modules were modbad.  We tried downloading CIOC and ....  Finally, we cycled power on the 2 wide and when it powered up, everything was fine.  

The above isn't so bad since it showed in Diag that something was wrong.

Scenario two: Another event was also on a CIOC, but was analog inputs. There was no local indication that the Charms were unhealthy from the LEDs on the individual charms IO modules.  Diagnostics did not show any yellow question marks. The control modules showed modbad and inputs to the loops were showing out of range. The 4-20 on the actual inputs were within range.  I cycled power on the CIOC and everything came back ok....  An event happened exactly like the analog input description above but on a totally separate system with same solution of cycling power.

Has anyone else seen this?     Thanks!

• CIOC
• Indicators
• CHARMS
• Diag

s_brwn

• 9 Jun 2025 4:10 PM
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1 Reply

• Andre Dicaire

  

  • 10 Jun 2025 4:09 PM

  The cycling Green/Red LED is intended to indicate that the Output CHARM has been driven to its Fault State Output (default is hold last value, or can be a fixed value such as 0% or De-energized state). This happens when the CHARM is no longer receiving communications from the CIOC or the CIOC is no longer receiving communication from the host controller of the Output channel. If some Outputs are assigned to controller A and others assigned to controller B, and controller B stops communicating, those Outputs show this state, indicating the CHARM is healthy (green) but has a communication issue (red flashing). Although the CHARM is indicating some sort of issue, the source of the issue is in the CIOC or its communications to the controller driving the outputs. I don't know if it's possible to know exactly what was affecting the CIOC and controller comms, but a GSC call might be able to get clarity if there is information stored in the controller and CIOC local event logs.
  
  As for the AI channels reporting out of range, that would be abnormal. On a power outage, your field instruments would lose power as well, and it is likely that the CHARM would have seen an out of range signal during initialization and CIOC commissioning. But the CHARM and CIOC should recover and start reporting valid Signal.
  
  How did you check the current was within range? Curious. Did you measure voltage (1-5V) at the AI Terminal block, or a nonintrusive Amp meter?
  
  Again, logging a CTS call with the GSC is you best bet to get a root cause explanation. Either this is a known issue that is resolved with a Hotfix that you may not have applied, or it is a new issue that the factory would want to be aware of. They would want to know the Firmware installed on the CIOC's, and affected AI CHARMs, and likely their serial number to track any known issues related to hardware. They would likely also want to know the instruments that were connected. Some instruments initialize in unique ways. When chasing a root cause, one has to look at the entire problem and not assume anything.
  
  If you don't get a smoking gun explanation in this forum, please submit a call to the GSC.

  Andre Dicaire

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