Motorola ACE Driver

Not counted towards your tag license limit.

The Motorola ACE driver should be used for all Motorola ACE / Moscad RTUs in your system.

Driver Errors: To learn more about the cause of an error condition, refer to the Driver Summary Report and the Driver Error Report, both of which are available in the Reports page. The Show Stats button will also provide current and last error messages: Show Statistics Button Widget

Reference Notes:

Requires a Motorola IP Gateway tag, and the Motorola table configuration file, MDLC_TYP.CFG, which lists the possible RTU table configurations.

This driver relies on the parent IP Gateway device to report whether a site is up or not. That device must be properly configured via the Motorola STS software. Please refer to the STS Advanced Features PDF, which should be installed with STS.

The configuration file describes only the configuration for communication. It does not configure the RTU. This file should be modified to match the configuration of the RTU.

When viewed in the Tag Browser, the RTU ID value configured in this driver will be shown as the address.

Related information:

Motorola ACE Driver I/O Addressing

Motorola IP Gateway

Best Practices for Tags

Motorola IP Gateway: ID tab

The ID tab of every tag includes the same common elements: Name, Area, Description, and Help ID.

Name:

Uniquely identifies each tag in the application. If the tag is a child of another, the parent names will be displayed in a separate area before the name field.

You may right-click on the tag's name to add or remove a conditional start expression.

Area

The area field is used to group similar tags together. By defining an area, you make it possible to:

Filter for particular tag groups when searching in the tag browser
Link dial-out alarm rosters to Alarm tags having a particular area
Limit the number of tags loaded upon startup.
Filter the alarm display to show only certain areas.
Filter tag selection by area when building reports

When working with Parent-Child tag structures, the area property of all child tags will automatically match the configured area of a parent. Naturally, you can change any tag's area as required. In the case of a child tag, the field background will turn yellow to indicate that you have applied an override. (Orange in the case of user-defined types. Refer to Configuration Field Colors)

To use the area field effectively, you might consider setting the same Area for each I/O driver and its related I/O tags to group all the tags representing the equipment processes installed at each I/O device. You might also consider naming the Area property for the physical location of the tag (i.e. a station or name of a landmark near the location of the I/O device). For serial port or Roster tags, you might configure the Area property according to the purpose of each tag, such as System or Communications.

You may define as many areas as you wish and you may leave the area blank for some tags (note that for Modem tags that are to be used with the Alarm Notification System, it is actually required that the area field be left blank).

To define a new area, type the name in the field. It will immediately be added. To use an existing area, use the drop-down list feature. Re-typing an existing area name is not recommended since a typo or misspelling will result in a second area being created.

There is no tool to remove an area name from VTScada since such a tool is unnecessary. An area definition will exist as long as any tag uses it and will stop existing when no tag uses it (following the next re-start).

Description

Tag names tend to be brief. The description field provides a way to give each tag a human-friendly note describing its purpose. While not mandatory, the description is highly recommended.

Tag descriptions are displayed in the tag browser, in the list of tags to be selected for a report and also on-screen when the operator holds the pointer over the tag’s widget. For installations that use the Alarm Notification System, the description will be spoken when identifying the tag that caused the alarm.

The description field will store up to 65,500 characters, but this will exceed the practical limits of what can be displayed on-screen.

This note is relevant only to those with a multilingual user interface:
When editing any textual parameter (description, area, engineering units...) always work in the phrase editor. Any changes made directly to the textual parameter will result in a new phrase being created rather than the existing phrase being changed.
In a unilingual application this makes no difference, but in a multilingual application it is regarded as poor practice.

Help Search Key

Used only by those who have created their own CHM-format context sensitive help files to accompany their application. Refer to Custom Help Files

Server List

Select (or create) a named server list. (Driver Server Lists) Servers for the list must be defined using the Application Configuration dialog, as described in Servers for Specific Services. Smaller sites that do not have multiple servers, or that use only the default server list, need not configure this field.

Motorola ACE Driver properties Settings tab

The settings tab is used to define the communication parameters to your Motorola ACE RTU. The IP Gateway device will handle retries and timeouts. No field exists in this driver to allow a retry specification. Time limit values are provided only as a fall-back in the case that the IP Gateway does not handle the time limit.

Motorola IP Gateway

The name of a configured Motorola IP Gateway. The first such parent found will be used automatically.

RTU ID

The identifier of the MDLC network that the RTU device was configured with.

RTU Type

Should match the RTU type, as specified in the API configuration file. This name will be found immediately after the keyword, "Type" and just before the table definitions.

RTU Status Interval

The period between RTU status polls.

Burst Refresh Interval

The burst refresh poll interval. Used to cause a read poll to occur at a regular interval while the driver is using burst mode and polling would otherwise be disabled.

Read Time Limit

The IP Gateway device configuration provides the time-outs to be used. The value in this field is only to provide a fail-safe in the event that the usual time-out limit fails to work for read operations.

Write Time Limit

Hold

Select this to have I/O tags attached to the driver hold their last value in the event of a communication failure. If not selected, tags will have their value set to invalid on a communication failure.