Set up alarm and acknowledgment points

Alarm handling involves configuring the Niagara station to send alarm status to the Mercury ACS console where the alarm can be acknowledged. This makes it possible to consolidate building monitoring and access security in one location.

Alarm configuration requires two virtual points added during Mercury panel point discovery:

A BooleanWritable that must be linked with a source control point, such as a proxy point for a boiler on the Niagara side. When the source point goes into alarm, it sets this virtual point to “true,” which causes the alarm to appear on the Mercury console.
A second virtual point that may be a BooleanWriteable (output) or a BooleanPoint (input). This point is used by the Mercury console to turn off the output to the Mercury panel and acknowledge the alarm in the NiagaraAX station.

This procedure links this pair of virtual points to the standard Niagara device points that issue and acknowledge an alarm. For the sake of illustration, the procedure assumes you want to configure a boiler alarm to appear on the monitor and be acknowledge by the security guard who is responsible for the Mercury access control system. During discovery, the virtual points were named as follows:

Virtual boiler alarm
Virtual boiler alarm acknowledgment

Expand the Config node in the Nav tree and locate the proxy point associated with the Niagara device.
In the example, this would be the proxy point associated with boiler status.
To view the point’s property sheet, double-click the point or right-click the point and select Views→Property Sheet.
Add a Mercury driver point extension by expanding the Extensions folder in the Mercury palette, and dragging and dropping the appropriate alarm extension onto the property sheet.
The Mercury alarm extensions are functionally the same as the standard alarm extensions with the addition of two properties, Alarm Point Ord and Ack Point Ord.
Expand the alarm extension property sheet and scroll down to the bottom of the properties list.
Scroll to the right, and click the browser icon (
) next to Alarm Point Ord.
Locate the appropriate virtual BooleanWriteable output point you discovered and added for the purpose of communicating the alarm from the NiagaraAX station to the Mercury panel.
Associate the Ack Point Ord with the appropriate virtual input point you discovered and added for the purpose of deactivating and acknowledging the alarm.

The example above shows the Alarm Point Ord and Ack Point Ord after scrolling to the right (to the end of the ord) to see the names of the points.

Behind the scenes, the Mercury driver configures the wiresheet to connect the points. When the source Niagara control point goes into alarm in the station, the output point reports the alarm to the Mercury side.