ASCO ATS's

Status
Not open for further replies.
G

GMc

Senior Member
Morning All,

I'm not quite sure if this is the correct section to ask this question so please forgive me if a goofed. It's not even a electrical question.

We have multiple ASCO ATS?s throughout our facility. There is a 4 conductor serial cable that connects to these switches in a combination of parallel and daisy chain configuration. I?m assuming that it is either RS-422 or 485. The terminals are marked T+, T-, R+ and R-. All the cables are terminated at the generator station onto a terminal strip inside one the control cabinets. From this strip another 4 conductor cable runs to the ATS annunciator which allows us to see the status and have manual control of all the ATS?s.

My questions are,
1, How do I determine for sure the protocol they are using.

2, Is there a device I could connect to this serial trunk to gather the same information as the annunciator and send it to a PC based network.

Thanks in advance,
GMc
 
My questions are,
1, How do I determine for sure the protocol they are using.

2, Is there a device I could connect to this serial trunk to gather the same information as the annunciator and send it to a PC based network.
Click to expand...


Depending upon the vintage of the ATS will determine the capabilities and options would need additional information.
 
quality library reading time with the O&M manual
Click to expand...

Went through submittles, manuals and blue prints. ASCO doesn't share much information.

Depending upon the vintage of the ATS
Click to expand...

The ATS's were installed 12 years ago. Most of them (95%) have group 7 controllers. There are a handfull that were upgraded to group 5.

I appreciate the responses.

The more I look into this I'm tending to believe that I'm dealing with proprietary equipment.

Thanks,
Gary
 
sounds like your best source of info is going to be directly with the manufacturer to see what products they have for monitoring (if any ). its worth a few calls - if they have the products I'm sure they would love to sell them to you.
 
GMc said:
How do I determine for sure the protocol they are using.
Click to expand...

I've heard of ASCO, never seen this equipment, but it was easy enough to find.

ASCO ATS, group 7 controllers are using ASCOBUS I or II protocol, depending on the ATS series. See the "Connectivity Summary Information", in the "Connectivity Module" manual.
http://www.asco.com/Products/manuals/381333_238B.pdf

This manual shows how to test communication to the Connectivity Module, and change configuration settings with a Windows laptop. The pin identification for the cables are described in the "Specifications" section.

J4 Serial RS-485 Port: One 5-pin terminal block header with a socket block (J4) designed to be daisy chained for up to 32 devices.
Terminal 1 ? RX+, Terminal 2 ? RX-
Terminal 3 ? TX+, Terminal 4 ? TX-
Terminal 5 ? Com

ASCO group 5 controllers use Modbus Protocol. See the manual for "Connectivity to the ASCO Power Manager Xp & 7000 Series Group 5 Controller via Modbus"
http://www.ascopower.com/Products/manuals/381339_221F.pdf
 
sounds like your best source of info is going to be directly with the manufacturer
Click to expand...

And then I will be in the same boat down the road when I want to do something else, call ASCO and dish out big money.

probably a silly question, but are you sure those aren't the generator start signal wires?
Click to expand...

Not a silly question at all. These 4 conductors w/shield are a serial communication bus that communicates with our annunciator panels. The panels show available power (norm, emer.) at each ATS, show what the ATS is connected to (norm, emer.) and also control the ATS manually. These are not the normal start command wires that I think you refering to.

ramsy,

All the group 5 and group 7 controllers are on the same serial bus so I have to believe they both have to be using this ASCOBUS I and II I've been reading about.

The "Connectivity Module" that you see have to be installed in each ATS. They must only be capable of talking to 1 ATS address (00 - 31). I was trying to figure a way capture the date from the serial cable that connects to the annunciator.

Thanks again everyone,
GMc
 
GMc said:
All the group 5 and group 7 controllers are on the same serial bus so I have to believe they both have to be using this ASCOBUS I and II I've been reading about.
Click to expand...

"Buses" are just hard wire, and "protocols" are equipment dependent. ASCOBUS on both groups requires the group 5 equipment (Modbus) to be backward compatible with multiple protocols.

Check the documents provided; if not the controllers then the annunciator should be backward compatible (allowing both protocols at your data cable).
 
RS485 is a half duplex protrocol on one pair of conductors.
Click to expand...

RS485 uses a 4 wire version also. After all the reading I've done, I'm pretty sure thats what we have.
 
See: http://www.ascoswitch.com/Products/manuals/381339_221F.pdf for the Modbus protocal and other information about this ATS data. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-485 for info on RS-485.

That said, taping into the data stream could yield very little information as you are listen only and cannot send commands to read out data. Most likely the annunciator polls just a few data / status registers from all the ATS's and only when you select a specific ATS & data you want, does it poll for that data. Otherwise the response / update time would be quite long if it read all the data out, from all ATS's, all the time. ICBW.

If you can find out which protocol is used and can hook up into the data stream and capture an hours worth of data, there are many people (including me) that would be able to write a PC program that decodes it and have it available for users over a network, via a web browser / other means.
:)
 
justdavemamm,

Most likely the annunciator polls just a few data / status registers from all the ATS's and only when you select a specific ATS & data you want, does it poll for that data.
Click to expand...

The annunciator shows the status of all ATS's all the time without touching any button. When a ATS's is to be operated manually then one needs to press the button that is assosiated with that ATS.

If you can find out which protocol is used and can hook up into the data stream and capture an hours worth of data, there are many people (including me) that would be able to write a PC program that decodes it and have it available for users over a network, via a web browser / other means.
Click to expand...

That would be great. I was thinking a device like this might allow me to connect a laptop with a hyper terminal session to capture that data. What do you think?

Thanks,
GMc
 
GMc said:
justdavemamm,



The annunciator shows the status of all ATS's all the time without touching any button. When a ATS's is to be operated manually then one needs to press the button that is assosiated with that ATS.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking the status is just from a few words, which can be constantly polled from all the ATS's. Each ATS has over 100 registers of data that can be read out. Then when you select one, more data is pulled from it.

GMc said:
That would be great. I was thinking a device like this might allow me to connect a laptop with a hyper terminal session to capture that data. What do you think?

Thanks,
GMc
Click to expand...

While HyperTerminal has its uses, see this thread for even better tools: http://www.edaboard.com/ftopic30487.html

For the hardware, what you show might work, but the description is not so good enough to tell.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top