Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Munro Jr, John K." <[email protected]> · Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:25:30 +0000

Hi Rod,

Background noises and alarm floods are also potential problems, so if alarms are really important, audio needs to be supplemented with visual alarms (i.e., a multi-factor approach needs to be considered).  Relying on audio alarms alone is probably not going to be satisfactory because someone is always going to be adjusting something to suit individual preferences.  Are you doing any alarm filtering?

John Munro
ORNL

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rod Nussbaumer
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 4:27 PM
To: epics Techtalk
Subject: Alarm annunciation with ALH and other PC based systems

Hi All:

Sorry that this isn't really an EPICS question, other than the tenuous 
connection via Alarm Handler.

The question has been raised here about how to ensure that the audible 
alarms from Alarm Handler are always audible. A number of places exist 
where this can be disabled. The speakers can become faulty, the 
wall-wart commonly used to power the speakers can become disconnected or 
faulty, the volume control on the speakers can be turned down, the host 
OS software controls can be turned down or muted either through accident 
or software fault, audio cables can become faulty, and sound card 
hardware can become faulty. Most of these will manifest only in silence.

Has anyone undertaken measures to monitor any of these components in 
some way, or implemented hardware which is not subject to the common 
frailties of commodity audio equipment used for control room alarms?

Any suggestions cheerfully accepted. Thanks.

Rod Nussbaumer
E-Linac Controls, TRIUMF
Vancouver, Canada.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System