Section 1. Introduction
The PCSYSCON
The PCSYSCON is a plug-in board for PC-compatibles. It can
measure various conditions inside your PC and produce several
sorts of alarm signals. It can also produce alarms from external
analogue and digital signals, and it has eight general-purpose digital
input and eight digital output lines.
The purpose of the board is to give advance warning of potential
trouble in industrial PC systems. There are many possible sources
of trouble, such as an aging or overloaded power supply, excessive
temperature rise or programs that have crashed when controlling
some critical process. The PCSYSCON can detect these conditions
when properly set up.
However, a note of caution. If you are going to use the PCSYSCON
to detect a potential problem, you must set it up and then create or
simulate the problem. You will then be able to prove that your
hardware and software can indeed detect the problem and take
appropriate action. No amount of hardware is going to help if the
program or operators fail to take any notice when a problem is
detected.
About the PC
PC-compatibles are often used for I/O intensive applications with
boards such as the PCSYSCON. Unfortunately, some features of the
PC can make life difficult for users. We have tried to address these
problems with the PCSYSCON. For example, it is sometimes difficult
to find I/O address space in a PC - we have created a unique pointer
addressing scheme which only takes up two bytes of PC I/O space
but allows hundreds of I/O locations on the board. Another common
problem is that of getting large numbers of cables safely into a PC.
Arcom designed a signal-conditioning system which has been in use
on other buses for some years; this system is also available for the
PCSYSCON.
Features of the PCSYSCON
The PCSYSCON has voltage and temperature monitors, a
watchdog, external optoisolated inputs and analogue input trips. It
can sound an internal buzzer, switch a relay or trigger a PC interrupt
on detecting an alarm condition. Alarm conditions are also output on
the 50-way I/O connector, which also carries the eight general-
purpose digital inputs and eight outputs.
The voltage and temperature monitors detect under-voltage and
over-temperature conditions. They are designed to operate even if
the program in the PC has crashed completely - they do not rely on
a background program operating continuously. Their alarm levels
can be set up in software.
The watchdog monitor function is intended to be integrated into your
software. The principle is that your application program starts the
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Section 1. Introduction
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J278 PCSYSCON