Any idea why Lookout 5.0 stops polling sites?

[JPhillips]

I am running Lookout 5.0 on a Windows XP Dell Comp with 1Gb of RAM. My SCADA system monitors pump and sewerage stations. Recently, I have noticed that some of my stations loose their trends and when I go to check the Modbus statistics on these stations I find out that Lookout will no longer poll these particular stations automatically or with me hitting the poll pushbutton over and over again. I restart the file and they start polling. Does anyone have any idea what would cause Lookout to stop polling certain sites and not others? By the way, this is not happening to the same sites over and over again - the sites are random and this seems to start occuring a couple of days after I restart the file.

Any help would be greatly appr
eciated.

Jason

[andreoliveira 47]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for using our discussion forum. Regarding the issue you have reported I was researching in our internal database and I could not find anything similar to it.
If you are using modbus serial one thing that you could do is to set the Diagnostic File under "Options << Serial Ports..." to show the data exchanged between the external device and the Lookout Process file. You could then poll the device using a pushbutton and verify which information has been sent through the serial port, you coul then compare this information on the two situations, when it works and when it does not seem to work.
If you are using modbus ethernet though, what you could do is to create a second server process (a very simple one) and set it to only one of the stations (on
e that has shown the behavior before) and see if the behavior comes up again.
The problem is most likely caused by something else in the process file and using a very simple server process with only one modbus object may clarify that for you.

Best Regards

Andre Oliveira
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[JPhillips]

I am using modbus serial and I have already created diagnostic files for each port and when the stations stop being polled the diagnostic file stops showing polling data for those particular stations because Lookout is not polling them anymore. You said that the problem is most likely caused by something else in the process file, and I was hoping you could give some examples of what, in my process file, would all of a sudden stop Lookout from polling stations?

Thanks!

Jason

[jbesselm]

Jason;

Are you using the same serial port? Are you using a modem?

I had a similar problem with Lookout 4.5. In my case it would stop polling anywhere from a few days to a few months. I was using a USB modem that was constantly in use.Each time it would stop polling there would be no alarm or indication other than the loss of data. Eventually I replaced the modem with an internal model with a built in controller. Since then I've had no more problems. It's been about three months now. In my case the computer was a Dell with Windows 2000.

Good Luck

Jim Besselman
Control Automation, Inc.

[JPhillips]

Jim,

Actually I use a serial port card because I need 4 com ports for the four radio frequencies I use to get my data. About a week and a half ago I ran defrag on the computer and everything ran fine until yesterday morning when the polling stopped again. I restarted it this morning and already it has stopped polling. I just ordered the NI RS232 USB Serial Port Converter. When you say a built-in controller, what is its function?

Thanks!