FieldServer FS-8700-83 Computer Drive User Manual


 
FS-8700-83 Gamewell Page 11 of 24
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1. If the Data Type is ‘Any’ then the map descriptor will be used to store data from message with
any status.
2. The state reported is filtered and must match the Data_Type for the associated array to be
updated. For example, if the Data_Type of a MapDesc is ‘Alarms’ and a message is received that
reports a Fault then the map descriptor will not be used to store the data from the message.
3. Normally, user’s are interested in the Status of a device / circuit / panel but they may also be
interested in the cause (or the ‘action’ in Gamewell terminology) of the message. When you
specify the Data_Type as ‘Action Numbers’ then the driver will store a value which can be used to
look up the action that produced the message. The most recent action number is stored over any
older value. (The driver does not provide an event log.)
4. Instead of storing a value to indicate the action, the driver can set a bit whose offset indicates
the action. For example, action 30 will cause the 30
th
bit to be set. Action bits are stored
retentively. This means that when a new action is reported the previous bits are left set and a new
bit is set too.
5. What happens if a message arrives that reports an alarm and you don’t have a map descriptor
with a Data_Type capable of storing an alarm. You can make a catch all map descriptor and use
the ‘Dump’ Data_Type to tell the driver to store the whole message in ASCII format in a data
array so that you can inspect it. You can also use this map descriptor to tell the driver to dump the
ignored message to the error log.
6.3 Status Types and Values
Generally, the driver stores non-zero values to indicate the state of a device / circuit / panel based
on the ‘status’ field of the incoming message. The specific non-zero value can be found in the
following table. The value have been chosen so that they correspond to different bits.
Status Value Stored
Alarm 1
Fault 2
Event 4
Bus 8
Comm 16
Control 32
Ack 64
Sig Sil 128
Supv 512
Genr 1024
Thus if a map descriptor has its Data_Type = ‘Any’ and two messages are received , one an
alarm and one an event, then the value of the array element will be set to 1 + 4 = 5. Thus the
value is non-zero to report the not-normal state but inspection of the value allows you to
determine the specific stat.
The value’s can be changed by using the method below to add, but when you add, use the
existing name and a new value.