by Josh Tafoya, Technical Trainer
(This is the third in a series of training blogs about automating your account comments for faster alarm handling. Links to the other blogs in the series are available at the end.)
Last week, we learned how to automate three of our notes! This week, we are going to continue by automating the Entry/Exit zones. As seen above, our “demonstration comment” says we should disregard zones 1 or 3 if there is a disarm within 60 seconds.
For this, we will be using the programming screen. The first step is to create the lines in the Transmitter Programming for a Burg Alarm (BA) on zones 1 and 3.
Next, to the far right, there will be a column labeled “Commands”. If you click the ellipsis (…) in one of the rows, the TX Programming Commands dialog will be displayed. At the top, we want to select “CanCancel” from the dropdown menu, and click “Add.”
Next, we need to fill out this screen to satisfy the comment needs. In this case, a Disarm (an OPEN signal) would be required to come in on either zone within 60 seconds, with the original alarm logged to history if such a signal occurs.
We will need to do the same for both programming lines.
Finally, we need to add one more programming line, indicating that an OP (Open) signal will satisfy the Cancel requirement:
The Cancel() command is added without parameters on the TX Programming Commands screen:
With these specified programming lines, the BA alarms that come in on zones 1 and 3 will be held, invisible to the operator, for 60 seconds while the system is waiting for the Open signal to cancel. There is no option for the operator to be able to choose the alarm from the Alarm Queue during this time.
This programming line was added at the customer level, as it was specific only to the one customer in my example. If the scenario existed where it made sense to apply this to a Transmitter Type, it could be done at that level as well. At this time, there is no option to allow Transmitter Programming at the Dealer level, so this programming may not be done at that level.
Now that we have added the programming, our comments now look like the following:
Next week, we will begin to look at how the Enhanced Action Patterns can help with some of our other comments.
I encourage everyone to sign up for Coffee with Manitou (scroll down to the very bottom right for the form) so you will have access to the back recordings, including Caryn’s great sessions about the Enhanced Action Patterns.
This is the third in a series of training blogs discussing how to automate comments for better efficiency and fewer errors. See the previous entries here:
Programming and General Schedules