Lost com?

RWozney

Has anyone found a way to display a "lost communication" message on the panel when an MVP panel goes off line? That would be a helpful tool for the customer.

Thanks,

RWW

Reese Jacobs

Panel Online/Lost Communication

For visual feedback for online/offline status, we found a use for the top/front right LED on the MVP-7500 and MVP-8400 panels. We tied a port/channel to the LED through the External Control page and then the master turns the LED on for 5 seconds and then off for 5 seconds continually. Since the master is controlling the LED through channel feedback, if the Master goes offline or communication is dropped, the LED remains off. We provide the customer the ability to turn it off (if it annoys them) and we also disable it during the night since the LEDs on the panels (as well as the base station) could be used to land small aircraft given their brightness. The customer can therefore glance at the touchpanel LED and within 5-10 seconds tell if the wireless panel is online. We have not done anything with hardwired panels since most of our installations (and panel online/offline issues) involve the MVPs. We originally implemented this capability where we did not have remote access to the ONLINE tree and we did not like the idea of talking the customer through touchpanel SETUP to look at the connection status. We also liked the idea of a status indicator that did not have to be placed on one or more touchpanel pages and further one that did not require the touchpanel be awakened to determined the status.

For what it is worth ...

Dries Kaspers

Another idea (also mentioned by another member of this board some time ago) is to place a button on all pages which is transparent in the ON state and has a text in the OFF state that says something like 'Panel Offline!' or whatever you want to put there.

Then put the following feedback in your code;
[dvTP,YourBtnNumber] = (DEVICE_ID(dvTP)) // channel is high if panel is online

as long as the panel is online the button will be invisible
when the panel goes offline for whatever reason the button flips to the OFF state displaying your message