Cannon Instrument miniQV-X - Manual (Page 32)

CANNON ® miniQV-X Automatic Viscometer with VISCPRO ® Instruction & Operation Manual
Version 1.0— October, 2008; CANNON ® Instrument Company
2139 High Tech Road • State College, PA 16803 • USA
26
You can toggle back and forth between the Sample Input window and
the new instrument group Machine Status window by pressing Ctrl-
Page Down.
Monitoring instrument status You can monitor the status of all instruments in an instrument group by
pressing Ctrl-Page Down from the Sample Input window to display
the Machine Status window. To return to the Sample Input window,
press Ctrl-Page Down again.In the image above, instruments three and
four do not exist but could be accommodated in this instrument group.
The “placeholders” for these instruments are greyed out to indicate that
additional machines are not yet online for the group.
If additional instruments are online but are not appearing in the correct
instrument group, check network connections and make certain that each
instrument is turned on and functioning normally. Then click Main/Poll
for Instruments to refresh communication with online instruments.
Group configuration
If your laboratory had 3 miniQV-X instruments with RS-485 connec-
tions, all could communicate with the computer via a single COM port,
provided that they were all assigned different instrument addresses. Each
instrument group provides its own Instrument View customized for that
instrument type. The number of instruments that can be assigned per
group varies per instrument type. The Cold-Cranking Simulator (CCS)
design allows only one instrument per group for that instrument type.
When a new type of instrument is found on a port, the VISCPRO soft-
ware automatically creates a group for that instrument. The maximum
number of instruments that can exist on that port is determined by the
nature of the instrument. A single COM port may be used for communi-
cation with multiple instrument TYPES as long as the total number of
instruments associated with the port does not exceed the maximum
number of instruments capable of being displayed in the group that can
contain the least number of instruments (usually four).
Configuring the Machine Status window to correspond with multiple-instrument
placement
It is desirable to configure your miniQV-X instruments so that the
VISCPRO software computer interface display for the instrument group
(Machine Status window) corresponds with the actual physical place-
ment of the multiple instruments in the laboratory.
Use a screwdriver to adjust the arrow on the instrument address dial
(inside the miniQV-X left wing panel) to assign each instrument in the
group a unique address using numbers 1-4 from left to right.