Crimson 3.x : Write zeros to tags upon comms loss

06 Jun 2025

Abstract

This document describes using the Isdeviceonline() function to detect comms loss and write zeros to tags.

Products

Red Lion Controls CR1000 Human Machine Interface (HMI), CR3000 HMI, Data Acquisition (DA10, DA30), Data Station Plus, FlexEdge™ (DA50A, DA70A), G3 HMI, G3 Kadet HMI, Graphite® Controller, Graphite HMI, Modular Controller, and Productivity Station™ 

Use Case

Write zeros to tags instead of the tags holding the last known value.

Required Software:

Crimson 3.0, Crimson 3.1 & Crimson 3.2

Crimson Communication Configuration:

1. Follow this tech note and set up a tag called CommsStatus using Isdeviceonline()function to detect whether the comms to the Modbus slave or any third party slave device is online or offline

https://support.redlion.net/hc/en-us/articles/7781952535693-Crimson-3-x-Detect-Comms-status-

2. Set up a gateway block to read the data from third party slave and send it to internal tags as shown in Figure 1. and Figure 2. below

mceclip0.png

                                                                         Figure 1.

 

mceclip1.png

                                                                              Figure 2.

3. Go to the programs section in Crimson database and write a program as shown below in Figure 3.

  mceclip2.png

                                                                                     Figure 3. 

4. In my example, I am reading data from Modbus RS485 Slave device and writing the data to internal tags so that these internal tags can then be mapped to another protocol for example DF1 Master (in my example). If comms go down, we will update DF1 Addresses to 0 instead of these DF1 Addresses getting the last reported Modbus value.

mceclip3.png

                                                                            Figure 4.

5. Sample database is attached in this tech note.