Varec 4000 - Manual (Page 49)

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4000 Theory of Operation
7.7 Encoder Battery Backup
The ATT includes battery backup for the encoder. This allows level to be maintained across a power failure. Several
consideration are made to protect the battery from being fully discharged.
1. The battery must be physically enabled by the microprocessor. This allows the battery to be shipped connected
without being discharged.
2. Service personnel can turn the battery off. This will allow the battery to be disabled when a tank or a transmitter
is to be taken out of service for an extended period of time.
3. On-board circuitry limits the battery backup time to 24 hours. This allows battery life to be extended even if serv-
ice personnel forget to disable the battery during extended power outage conditions.
The battery is automatically turned on when the ATT is calibrated with a given level.
7.8 Temperature Measurement
The ATT measures temperature directly using a high accuracy 16 bit analog to digital converter. Temperature inputs
can be either a 3-wire Copper or Platinum RTD. Optionally the temperature can be manually entered. The 4120 Multi-
Element Temperature transmitter can be used as a replacement to a spot temperature bulb (RTD).
7.9 Host Communication
The Modbus host interface permits the ATT to directly communicate with any distributed control system utilizing the
Gould Modbus protocol. The Modbus protocol defines two data formats, ASCII and RTU. The RTU format specifies that
all data is in binary. The ASCII format specifies that all data is in ASCII (producing messages twice as long as RTU format
messages). The ATT only supports the RTU message format.
The Modbus protocol permits a host computer to view field devices as having analog input registers, analog output
registers, digital input registers, and digital output registers. Measured parameters, configuration parameters, and
status conditions are mapped to Modbus analog and digital registers.
A non-standard Modbus floating point register extension has been defined for use by the ATT. This format extension
permits floating point data to be directly read from and written to any Modbus device. The IEEE 754 standard floating
point format is used. Each floating point register consists of four bytes.
To provide compatibility with future enhancements, data written to undefined registers are accepted and ignored. Data
read from undefined registers returns a value of zero (0).
The supported Modbus functions and exceptions are indicated in the following tables.