Network Alarm Printer

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Thread Starter

Hong Chung

Most HMI softwares require an alarm printer to be connected locally. Is there anyway to print alarms over the network instead? Thanks.
 
Yes, I assume you are using an Ethernet network. You can use a print server device from people like HP which will connect your printer to the highway. These devices are not very expensive. Just map the printer port to the IP address in the print driver. The only thing you need to be careful about is having more than one MMI wanting to print the same alarm to the printer. You can install more than one printer on the highway and attach one printer to each MMI if you need redundancy.



 
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I khnew of a problem a few years back on Window NT 3.5 that when you put an alarm printer through the Ethernet, the printer would scroll to a new page after printing out every alarm instead of printing line by line. Does the problem still exist? What problems do you forsee for sharing the alarm printer between redundant scada servers? This is one area I'm looking at. Is it specific to any scada software (iFix, Citect, Wonderware)? Thanks a lot guys.
 
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Raoul Huisman

Hi

Depends on the operating system, when it Microsoft Windows just share and map a printer with the NET USE command

Raoul Huisman
Huisman.IT
 
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Dennis Murphy

I don't know about other HMI products, but Wonderware's InTouch allows you to print alarms to a network printer using the AlarmPrint utility that is on their Knowledge Base CD. It has filtering and other added features to print only the alarms you want automatically and it allows for printing older alarms on demand if you need to print historical alarm logs. Hope this helps!

Dennis Murphy
Q-mation Incorporated
Lowell, MA 01854
http://www.qmation.com
 
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Ranjeet Vaishnav

... or, you may want to get rid of the printers totally (if you have a large system). Then it would be great to use loggers ... connect the
printer port of your HMI to the data logger server and then you can access this server over TCP/IP anywhere you want, and have the Alarm Lists at your PC. Also gives great freedom to sort lists, copy into MS Excel etc, archive the alarms on a CD etc.!

Some products that I know of :

Smart Logger (www.smartlogger.dk)
Imac (www.ics-ltd.co.uk)

C H E E R I O ! !

Ranjeet VAISHNAV
 
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