Emerson Exchange 365

In reply to TexasDV:

It took a while to clear the cobwebs...

You can force a switch over of the serial card by writing to the SWREQ parameter. This is undocumented.

The Serial card is designed to switch over when it loses the ability to communicate on the serial bus. When there are two or more devices on the bus, a situation arises when one device may fail to communicate, but other devices do. The Serial card sees this communication and knows it is not faulty, and a switchover does not happen. The work around is to monitor the health of the devices on both the active and stand by cards, and if a switch over need is detected, you can programmatically request the switchover.

In your case, you can create a module that has an Operator activated parameter. When this is set True, an action block or CALC block can execute the SWREQ command and force the card to switch over.

'//CNTRL-1/IO1/C1/SWREQ.CV':=1;

I believe this parameter is not recognized by the database so if you do place this in a module, I recommend you create a dynamic reference and use an expression to set the path after download. This keeps the download verification from reporting an "unresolved" error, that actually will not be unresolved.

You'll need to proceed carefully and test the behavior of the commend. Not sure if you have to reset this to 0. you can verify the redundancy OINTEG and availability to indicate to the operator the command is able to execute. Maybe disable and shade out the button when the standby card is not available.

I'd start with the Dynamic Reference, define the path and then manually manipulate the parameter to observe the behavior of the card. Once you understand the timing and values needed (1 or 0) then you can set up the module to allow the operator to trigger it.

I would not recommend this to be manipulate directly from VBA script. Every console would have the code. Better to manage this in one location and let operators write to a module level parameter.

Good luck.

Andre Dicaire