The 400-Series firmware offers a dedicated I/O section that has vast customization options. This video walks you through all of the I/O settings available on a 400-Series device.
Video Transcript
Okay, so here we have the I/O Setup tab, this is where we will program and rename any of our inputs and outputs from relays, digital inputs, 1-Wire sensors, thermocouples, analog inputs, (or) registers, the VIN, which is the power coming into the unit to power up the the internals, and then timers. So here we’re on the Relays tab, and when we originally had scanned, these are our local expansion modules connected up to the X-400. These are our high current relays and then the LC is just for low current. I can come in and click edit, and this is going to be the same for any one of these relays on here. I can come in, change the name, change the on and off text, and then I can even even specify which device it is in the device relay. Relay groups are important, they allow you to group more than one relay together. So when you use control logic, you can actually trigger multiple relays in a group. Local relay number is important, it is used in the state.xml, state.json, and even the log files so if we don’t assign a local number to any one of our I/O’s, it will not show up inside of any of the logs or the state files as well. And you can also give it a power-up state, so when power is removed from the device and then power back on you can have it automatically be in a specific state. Or with the pulse time, this is just latching a relay closed for a certain amount of seconds that you specify.
Digital Inputs, so this is for our optically isolated digital inputs. Our inputs need 4-26 volts to turn on. You can come in, edit those as well. A cool feature about our inputs is on the mode, you have a simple on off, so voltage is present or absent. Then we also have a counter and a frequency. Counter is a really cool feature that you can use for digital pulse meters anytime you want to count the number of times it turns on. And then you can also have the frequency as well, and you would be able to actually add a slope and an offset to that. For the purpose of you know the demo today we’re just going to do a simple on off, you can even have advanced features, we can measure the total on time, so every time the digital input turns on, it will continuously measure that time. And this is specific to our 400 Series firmware.
1-Wire Sensors, this is where we can come in add all of our temperature sensors just click add and it will automatically find all the temperature sensors connected. And just go ahead rename it, assign it a local number. And even for remote sensors, this is for any ControlByWeb devices that you’ve wanted to add on, you can add those here as well.
Thermocouples, temperature really simple there.
Analog Inputs, so this is any of our 0-5, 0-10 or 4-20 mA sensors. We can come in, click edit, and rename it like normal. And then the slope and the offset is where we want to have engineered values. So when we have 0-5 or 0-10 volts, that doesn’t tell us much and so we want to have an engineer value, whether that’s psi, millimeters, you know any type of value we would go in and make that change. The device mode is you know how is this analog input set up, is it single ended so is that you know 0-5, 0-10. And with some of our other devices, we also have 4-20 mA built in as well which would be displayed under this drop down.
Register Values, they allow us to do a lot of different logic. They’re variables that do not hold a value and we can come in and, this one is being used in some logic, but we can come in and rename it, we can give it a value. So a register value just is a I guess a an external variable that allows us to do more logic. And then remote registers is just specific to any other devices that we have connected. Voltage in, really simple. You can come in, rename it.
Okay, so next we have the Timer section. You can see here I’ve created two different timers. If you have temperature monitoring and if you have a freezer, sometimes you don’t want email alerts going out right away, so we can actually create a timer to help us evaluate some logic which we can get into.