Dear all,

currently I’m working on one WinCC Advanced Runtime application. Beside RT I have 2 comfort panels. Now I started RT on PC and noticed that I should have some alarm horn. Well biggest disappointment is that apparently doesn’t have alarm horn notification as some kind of system function. I’m was searching and it seems that I should build my own alarm horn system using alarm and acknowledge tags. I have around 400 alarms so it will be big assignment. New alarm should activate sound but acknowledge should mute the alarm.

Please can you propose some best available solution. How can I play alarm sound in Windows 7. I found some solutions for WinCC Flexible but it seems that mplay32.exe doesn’t exist in Win7.

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/26106312/how-do-you-start-a-sound-file-via-a-script-in-the-wincc-flexible-pc-runtime-?dti=0&lc=en-WW

Many thanks.

Regards,

Alen

Hello

you don't need "mplay32.exe" and it isn't supported in Windows 7. As the FAQ you linked states, you need to use "wmplayer.exe".

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/ww/en/view/26106312

In WinCC flexible to play a sound file you need an external Media Player which is started from WinCC flexible RT. For the operating systems Windows 2000 and Windows XP this is "mplay32.exe", in Windows Vista and higher the player is called "wmplayer.exe". (Use the Search function of the Windows Explorer to determine the storage location of the application.)

 Here is the TIA Version of the FAQ:

• "How do you start a sound file via a script in WinCC Runtime Advanced?"
  https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/ww/en/view/109481492

About calling the horn:

I guess I would add the script to the "Incoming" Event in the properties of the Alarm. You can kill the horn by adding another script to the Events on the acknowledge tag or similar.

About the big amount of alarms: If you select all 400 alarms and then add the script it's added to all of them at once.

Hello Alen,

you can just trigger the alarm horn from the PLC - I guess there you have the information about new alarm. Then you would have only one tag on the HMI to execute e.g. wmplayer.

Best regards,

Frink

Dear all,

many thanks for your answers.

I’m deeply disappointed in this Siemens product. In general I’m big Siemens fan but this is unacceptable. Siemens is advertising WinCC Advanced RT as system which can be configured up to 8192 tags and for this scale of the system they don’t offer automatic alarm horn solution! Buuah! I’m mean Weintek 4’’ panel for 200 EUR has it and it is working fine. Siemens wake up!!!

At the end I decided to use PLC function for horn. There I filtered cca 100 most important alarms and make some horn signal /mute horn logic to trigger VB script with sound and to stop sound when I acknowledge alarm. I felt like an *** doing that but what can I do. Also I had an issue using BOOL horn signal because sound started only on first value change after that nothing. I switched to INT and put VB script call under Value Change and On Exceeding and it is working. If script call is just under value change it doesn’t work. I don’t understand why. To be honest don’t even care because I’m frustrating and just want to finish with it.

Regards

Alen

Hi,

Perhaps someone will be interested in this solution: