Alarms

Maybe you’re measuring the temperature of a microbiological culture in an incubator, or strain on a concrete bridge in high winds; you’ll need to be informed when a reading exceeds acceptable tolerances. In PicoLog 6, you can set up an alarm to alert users when a parameter goes out of range. This can be configured to play a sound, display visual alerts on the screen, run a specified application such as an email or SMS client, and automatically annotate the capture graph to mark when the alarm happened and its duration.

How to add an alarm

1. Enable and configure the relevant channel on the logger
2. Locate the alarm setup menu (it is found at the top of the Channels and Axes menu), click the alarm icon.  
3. Click the Add alarm icon  
4. Choose the alarm trigger mode from the following three choices: threshold, channel disconnected or custom expression

How to trigger a digital output on alarm

PicoLog 6 alarms can also trigger a digital output on devices with supporting hardware, such as the PicoLog 1000 Series, ADC-24 and DrDAQ. You can even trigger a digital output from one of these devices based on an alarm condition from another connected logger without digital outputs, such as a TC-08.

It is also possible to set an alarm when a device becomes disconnected: an alarm is turned on, the event recorded and the graph annotated to show that the lost data was due to device disconnection.

Setting up complex alarm conditions

Complex alarm conditions can also be programmed using the versatile PicoLog expression builder, see this help topic for detailed information.