Good morning, SF.

A project at work has me putting a PLC and an HMI together for an multiple-oven process monitor. Boiled down, I'll have the PLC watching signals from several independent ovens, tied to an HMI for on-site monitoring. The HMI is email-capable, and I'll use that feature to send an email or a text message when certain conditions exist (over temperature, for instance).

Planning last week led to the [now-obvious] truth that a text or an email could easily go unnoticed when the system sends it at 2am or some such. That, of course, led to the question: is there a device we can add that would set off a couple of phone calls to specific people under an alarm condition? something that could take a simple digital input as its trigger?

I'm sure such a thing exists, but my surfing hasn't let me to it yet. Anyone dealt with such a device or system?

Thanks, all.


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Because I hate it when others use acronyms I'm not familiar with, and I'd hate to do that to someone else:
PLC: Programmable logic controller
HMI: Human-machine interface (Essentially, a touch-screen control panel.)

Most of our PLC functions are internal. Hartman and Braun had that function in their GC’s via a land line connection decades ago so I’m sure there’s a way to do it. I’ve never had a need for that so I can’t help but I’m guessing someone here has done it.

I just found this: http://ipautodialer.com/

It looks as simple as what I'm looking for. I need to do some more learning, though.

Have you verified that your HMI won't send to multiple addesses?

quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:
Have you verified that your HMI won't send to multiple addesses?

I can send to multiple addresses, yes. But still, an email or a text is likely to go unnoticed. Ringing the maintenance manager's phone (or my boss's phone) is going to get some attention!

My boss has even told me that he's disabled email alerts on his phone. Reason? He gets over a hundred work emails in a given day. He'd be interrupted every few minutes if he left that turned on. The phone ringer, however, gets left turned on.

We looked at using one of these Weidmuller Cell Modem

Never did use it but what I liked about it is that it has a series of inputs that you can toggle from the PLC and then canned phone calls go out based on the inputs activated.

We use One Call Now for alerting employees. It will send a voice, text and email from their web/mobile interface or you can use their API to launch canned messages from your own program. Don't know if you will have any software involved that could use this feature.

https://help.onecallnow.com/ap...8/~/web-services-3.2