Temperature channel on a TC-120 fails to update

[soren_jensen]

On a cFP bank with several types of I/O modules I see a strange behaviour on a TC channel. In Max this is indicated by the value in the timestamp column is set to "01:00:00:000", whereas all the other thermocouples on the same module update correctly. Please see attachment.

søren h. jensen

shj@cjc.dk , srhj@topsoe.dk

[Morini]

Hi Søren,

Have you tried the module in different slots?  It does sound like a small portion of the TC-120 has gone bad.  Do any of the other channels on the other modules show this behavior?  Does this also occur when you are reading the data in LabVIEW?  It would also be helpful to try a different controller and complete backplane to try and isolate the issue to only the module.

You may also want to update your FieldPoint driver to 5.0.1 from Drivers and Updates. But I think the problem is maybe with the TC-120 module it self.

Regards

[soren_jensen]

Dennis,

Thanks for your suggestion, but I think this is sw related not hardware related. I have serveral TC-120 modules that display the same behaviour. All in all its a cFP system with some 32 modules (AI,AO,DI,DO). Its a random behaviour and the lacking timestamp does not always show up on the same channel, nor does it always show up.

FP version is 5.0.1 and latest update

When downgrading Fieldpoint drivers from ver. 5.2.0 to 5.1.2 on cFP target it seemed to help the problem a bit, but did not completely solve the problem. NI denmark is on this issue, but do not currently have a solution. The update problem on the TC modules is somehow colosely conencted to connecting to SV's with different references, we have seen the described behaviour with TC channels failing to update, activated by a write cmd to a SVs that is not hardware connected. After this issues arrises, even physically unplugging the TC module, does not update the channel when viewed from Max (or any other way of reading a channel). This is why I am certain that its not something that we have programmed that causes this.

Would reformatting the cFP target and reinstalling every sw compoent on the cFP target perhaps help ?

Any other suggestion is very welcome.

We have an experimental setup at the cost of 700.000 Euro not running because of this problem, moreover its the first all-labview setup where we are trying to avoid the need of PLC's in the future, but as you might have guessed we do not have much luck. We have 2*10 years+ labview experience in house and know our stuff well.

søren jensen

[TommyTestBoy]

Søren -

I have not seen a problem like this before, but I agree, it looks like a SW problem.  Can you give me a better idea of your HW and SW setup so I can try to reproduce it?  I can see from your screen shot that shows the problem that you have at least one 2120, are all four controllers in your application 2120s?  Do you have the same set of modules on each of the 4 FieldPoint banks?  (3 AI-11s, 5 TC-120s) 

Are you running LV RT applications on all four controllers?  Or just one of them?  Or is the application running on a PC and you are just gathering all the inputs to the application on the PC?

You said you can reproduce the problem a little easier if you write to a Shared Variable - where is the Shared Variable hosted - on the controller or on a PC?

Hopefully we can help you find a way around this problem.

-Tommy

[TommyTestBoy]

Søren -

One more question - do you have a Time Server configured for your cFP-2120?  You can check this by going to the Network Settings tab of your cFP-2120 in MAX.

-Tommy

[soren_jensen]

Sorry for not posting before now. The problem was solved, but I never quite managed to locate the cause of the problem. For some strange reason that I do not understand, it seems that if there is a mismatch between the IAK module configuraiton and the same configuration on the physical I/O module, then on networked I/O modules the above mentioned problem with update failures randomly happen.

Currently I will not persue this problem further, since my system now no longer shows this error, but thanks for helping, I really apriciate it.

Søren H. Jensen