Duty & Alarm Panels
Local Operator Panel
Many vessels use Alarm Extension Panels and Local Operation Panels (LOP’s) to display any alarm that might be active at that time. These LOP’s are often small, unattractive character displays with barely enough room for two lines of plain text.
The FT NavVision® system however uses a high-end, yet low-cost replacement for these character displays.
The “Graphic Alarm Panel” uses a 800×480 TFT screen with touch functionality, driven by a small industrial computer running an embedded operating system. Finished with a high-grade stainless steel cover and 3 LED-pushbuttons, the Graphic Alarm Panel offers tons more functionality than the character displays.
These LOP’s can be used for multiple uses like CCTV surveillance, data monitoring and, in the near future, multimedia entertainment. This versatility is realized by the hardware used, and the FT NavVision® framework to which it is connected.
The Graphic Alarm Panel is in fact a tiny, industrial-grade computer. It is based on the standard client & server systems used in a FT NavVision® network. Just like these other systems, a Graphic Alarm Panel runs on Windows XP Embedded. The 7” touch screen allows for direct interaction with the alarm panel, which is used for navigating through present alarms and acknowledging them.
As mentioned before, the Graphic Alarm Panel comes with three hardware LED-buttons. By default, these are used to turn on the panel, acknowledge alarms and to dim the buttons’ LED’s. Using the WAGO 750 system’s PLC programming, they can be configured to do a wide variety of other things such as resetting a dead-man timer or for opening specific FT NavVision® Viewers on the screen.
A Duty Alarm Panel (DAP) is a tiny panel PC used to display any alarm that might be active at that time. It uses a 6.5” touch screen which allows for direct interaction with the alarm panel and is used for navigating through present alarms and silencing them. The DAP is driven by a small industrial computer running an embedded operating system. By default, these are used to switch between a manned and unmanned machinery space, silence alarms and to dim the LED buttons.
The LED-pushbuttons are also used for resetting a dead man’s timer (as part of the dead man’s watch alarm system) or for opening specific FT NavVision® viewers on the screen.
Alarms are handled almost the same as all other data. The data is sent across the complete network ten times a second where each individual DAP decides what to do with the alarm.
The actions done by a DAP following an alarm depend on the settings made for this DAP.
FT NavVision Alarm Panel
Each individual DAP has individual settings i.e.:
• Display of alarm status
• Display of new alarms
• Sounding a buzzer when new alarms arrive
• Silencing alarms locally
• Reset of alarms
• Reset of timers
These lights are configured per group and per alarm station. For instance: when a navigation alarm arrives, the DAP checks if it has access to the relevant rights in the Navigation group and will act correspondingly.
