Look, Ma, No Wires!

Well, the big hit for the 2008 User Group of the Carolinas was Emerson's wireless offerings. Using the PlantWeb Cruiser, folks got an up close and personal look at the different wireless products from Emerson.


Our best attendance ever saw over 100 folks pack our Charlotte campus. Featured presentation topics included Emerson and DeltaV updates, Batch forward direction, AO and AMS sessions.



And as always, the BBQ was great! We missed Craig Johnson's personal touch at the pig cooker, but our pit master did a great job.




Finally, it wouldn't be a User Group with Larry Wolfe and his hat - great job, Larry!

UGOC 2008 "Collaboration - The Formula for Sucsess

It's that time again for the RE Mason annual User Group of the Carolinas. We've got over 160 folks registered this year and we kicked off the festivities yesterday. I'll post updates over the next couple of days of all the events (and more pictures!).

Active Directory and DeltaV

Well, a belated Happy New Year (and Valentine’s Day). But let me be the first to wish everyone a happy President’s Day.

So here’s one to watch out for – I don’t know how often this happens to DeltaV systems in the real world, but it has happened twice to us in our shop within the last year, so I thought I’d mention it. Apparently, among the many “oh, by the way” issues with Windows, there’s a flaw in Active Directory that causes a user account to be corrupted. I’m told on really large Active Directories (10,000 plus users), this can happen daily.

Well, imagine your not so large DeltaV system, setup as a domain. The laws of average would imply it could happen here too. But when it happens to the DeltaVAdmin account, look out! Things just sort of stop working, and on a reboot of the ProPlus, you’ve got problems. All those services and DCOM’s that use the DeltaVAdmin account to launch under don’t launch. The permanent fix is to uninstall DeltaV, delete the DeltaVAdmin account, and reinstall DeltaV. Kind of painful, especially in a development environment.

A really clever short term fix is to go into each one of those services and DCOM’s and change their launching account to Administrator. You’ll end up changing 20 or 30 settings (and get really tired of typing your Administrator password), but you’ll keep from having to reinstall DeltaV until you’re ready to do it – which needs to be very soon!

Your Wish List

I was told by some very smart folks to try and update my blog at least twice a week – boy have I blown that! Funny how project work and the holidays can get you off track.

So speaking of holidays, I thought I’d turn the tables and ask the process control community, especially the DeltaV users out there, what enhancement presents they’d like to see under the tree?

We’ve been generating a lot of validation support documents lately, so I’m hoping Santa brings me some new tools inside DeltaV Explorer that would help drastically reduce the effort.

What enhancements would you like? Forget the letters to the North Pole – just post a reply here and I’ll make sure Santa gets the message.

Technology Forum in RTP

On October 3rd and 4th, we hosted our first Carolinas Life Science Technology Forum at the Sheraton Imperial in RTP.

We had a great turnout and even hosted an open house at the RE Mason RTP office Wednesday evening. Over 20 workshops were held and one of the highlights was a talk from Joydeep Ganguly of Biogen Idec entitled “PAT from a Users Perspective”.

Mobile PantWeb Hits the Road

Check out the pics below – this new tool to help demonstrate Emerson’s Plant Web functionality is being put through its paces at REM Services, Inc. The Plant Web Mobile Demo was constructed in St. Louis by FabCon and rides in a specially modified panel truck. The unit will be used to train Emerson and Emerson Local Business Partner personnel in the Southeast region of the US. A limited number of customer demonstrations and shows will be scheduled over the next few months so watch the highways and byways of the Carolinas to catch a glimpse of this beauty.

All devices are installed and configured to demonstrate Plant Web Alert functionality using a DeltaV Scalable Process System and AMS Intelligent Device manager.

Larry Wolfe of REM Services gave me a tour inside and out, along with a test drive – this thing is way cool.

Massive ARRAY Storage In DeltaV

OK, I'll admit I'm old school, but I sure did like global registers back in my PROVOX days. And I've longed for them in DeltaV for a while. In fact, I did something about it.

While the ARRAY parameter type is OK in DeltaV, it really lacks the size offered by PROVOX global registers (rows x columns <= 255 and rows <= 127). So I’ve created something I call the Enhanced Array Parameter composite or EAP. With the EAP, you get 10,000 floating point addressable storage locations in a single, easy to interface linked composite you can drop into any DeltaV module.

Right now, it’s more of a flat file storage option (like the global registers), but I’m wanting to turn it into a 100 x 100 array – who knows, maybe I can even build in some matrix math.

The EAP is available now from REM Services as a licensable product – drop me a note if you’re interested. I’d also be interested in any opinions on matrices and matrix math in a DeltaV module – is it worth the effort or a waste of time?

PCA and DeltaV

Emerson just held their annual Global User Exchange in Dallas, TX. The event is getting bigger every year, which means, unfortunately, it’s getting harder to find the gems of take-away information.

One of the outstanding presentations was a joint workshop between Emerson and Lubrizol on their work with Principle Components Analysis (PCA) in batch processes entitled “Coupling Process Control Systems and Process Analytics to Improve Batch Operations”.

Robert Wojewodka of Lubrizol gave the best non-technical analogy of PCA I’ve ever seen. If you were in attendance, be sure and take a look at the PowerPoint supplied at the conference. If you didn’t make it, find someone who did and get a copy.

The results will be presented next year on trials they have planned for this winter in France, so stay tuned.

Always Know Your Datalink Counts

Here's an interesting tidbit I got from Scott Thompson of REM Services - to make sure you always get the Datalink count dialog box when you save changes to a graphic display in DeltaV Operate configure mode:

• Go to frsVariables -> misc_glb -> gb_AlwaysShowDatalinkCount parameter
• Right-click on the parameter and select Property Window
• Edit the Current and InitialValue fields to be True
• Save the frsvariables by doing a right-click on frsvariables and selecting Save

Customizing DeltaV Overview Display Selection

Brian Church, of REM Services, dug around compiling how-to's for having a different overview screen for each DeltaV Operator station.

Turns out it's version specific -

In versions 7.x and before, you need VB code in the user settings file similar to this:

if frsVariables.gs_wsName.currentvalue = "WS1" then
frsVariables.gs_overview_main.currentvalue = "OVW1"
else
if frsVariables.gs_wsName.currentvalue = "WS2" then
frsVariables.gs_overview_main.currentvalue = "OVW2"
else
frsVariables.gs_overview_main.currentvalue = "OVW3"
end if
end if

In versions 8.x and above, you can have different user settings files for each workstation, so all that VB code is unnecessary.

Thanks, Brian!