ADAM-6060 Relay Plugin

Owned by Isabelle Avery (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 12, 2022 by Charlotte Dakin-Norris
5 min read

Introduction

The page discusses the integration of the Advantech Adam-6060 remote I/O module with the Witness system.

The Advantech Adam-6060 remote I/O module is a Modbus TCP device that has 6 digital input channels and 6 relays.

Witness can support more than one Adam unit, giving the option of a very large number of relay outputs and digital inputs. The software intelligently handles the indexing of relays and inputs so that the complexity of a multi-module setup is hidden from the user. The Adam unit provides the ability for the Witness software to communicate with external systems through the use of relays and in the other direction, external systems can provide useful triggers to Witness through the use of the digital inputs.

Contents

Technical Overview

When Witness generates events, such as alarms, or processes targets, it passes all this information to the Management Server. This is then converted into information appropriate for relay triggers. This could be in response to alarms being activated, including health alerts, or cameras being controlled. The plugin monitors the digital inputs on all the attached modules and passes any triggers into Witness software. These can be used to change system behaviour, such as switching system profiles, or deactivating alarms.

The plugin uses the Advantech SDK to provide seamless integration with Adam-6060 unit.

The ADAM-6060 Plugin

Witness supports integration with many different types of external systems through the use of plugins. These are stand-alone software libraries which are dynamically loaded by the Management Server and contain code which knows how to convert the Witness data into the required format for the external system. In this case, the Adam-6060 plugin uses the Advantech SDK to convert Witness data into relay triggers and to listen for external digital inputs.

The plugin can be selected during setup and will be automatically installed in the correct location along with the required SDK files.

Configuring the ADAM-6060 Plugin

Once you have made changes to the plugin configuration the changes will be applied immediately. This will force the plugin to disconnect from the ADAM device but it will immediately reconnect.

Once the plugin is installed, and Witness has been launched, the plugin will be visible in the UI. The Adam Relay Plugin settings can be found in the Integration Configurations folder.

The settings are as follows:

Enable Plugin: Select to enable the plugin.

Relay Mode:

Input Only: The module will only monitor the digital inputs.

Alarm: The module will monitor digital inputs and respond to alarm events, if configured.

Camera: The module will monitor digital inputs and respond to camera events, if configured.

Alarm and Camera: The module will monitor digital inputs and respond to both alarm and camera events, if configured.

Camera Relay Timeout (s): The period of time that the plugin will wait without receiving any camera commands before it opens the relay associated with a camera. If using relay triggers with cameras, the relay will be closed when the camera starts moving,each camera movement will reset this timeout. Once the camera has been idle for longer than this timeout period then the relay will be opened. The default is 10s.

Input Active State: This specifies the Boolean flag used when a digital input is closed. By default the inputs are flagged as True and switch to False when active. This behaviour can be changed on the Adam module in which case this setting should be updated to match.

Fail Safe Mode: Fail safe mode reverses the behaviour of the relays. By default an Adam module will close relays on activation and open when idle. For critical installations this behaviour is often reversed so that by default all relays are closed but opened on activation. This means that should anything happen to the module (i.e. lose power) then all the relays open putting everything into an alarm state. This setting must match whatever the configuration is on the Adam module.

Severity: This flag sets the severity to Unknown, Friend, Warning or Threat.

Adding a Relay

The Relay table indicates where there should be a list of each Adam relay unit to be controlled by the plugin. Each of these relays has to be added and configured within the Relay settings. To add a relay:

  1. Select the 'add' plus button.

  2. Configure the Adam Unit that is added to the table using the Relay Settings.

Relay Settings

Name: A user friendly name for the Adam module

Index Id: The unique index of each unit. The index sets the position of this module relative to others when there are more than one in use. For example, the Adam module with an index of 1 will handle relay with Ids 1 - 6; the device with an index of 2 will handle relays 7 - 12 etc.

It is important that the Index parameter is unique and runs sequentially, e.g. first unit is 1, second unit is 2 etc. Note that this setting is a 1 based index, so always starts at 1.

IP Address: The IP address of the Adam unit. This can be set using the Adam utility.

Port: The port used to access the unit. By default this is the default Modbus port which is 502.

Connection Timeout (s): The period of time the communication protocol will wait before timing out on each connection. The default is 0.25 s.

Read/Write Timeout (s): The period of time the communication protocol will wait before timing out on each read and write. The default is 0.2 s.

 

Safety is everything.