User's Manual Part 3

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- LEDs
The board is provided with three LEDs.
- On (green): it is lit when the exciter is switched on by local or remote control. The LED is blinking till the
power reach his nominal value.
- Remote (yellow): it is lit when the exciter has been set to accept remote commands. To have it accept local
commands again, the local/remote selection menu can be used.
- Alarm (red): shows that an alarm is present.
In case of alarm the red LED lights up and the icon of a bell appears in the upper bar of the display. If the alarm
disappears, the red LED is turned off and the bell starts blinking, in order to show that an anomaly occurred.
To know the details of the anomaly and when it occurred, the history menu can be used. Once this menu is
accessed, the blinking bell icon disappears.
While an alarm is present the exciter switch off the output power. When the alarm disappear, the power is
switched on again. After 5 times the exciter switch off the output power, the exciter goes in LockOut state: the
power remains off till the user reset the LockOut. If the fails are far more that 1 hour than the LockOut counter
is automatically cleaned.
TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Flash ROM 256kByte
RAM 6kByte
EEPROM 64kBit
Serial interfaces 2xRS485 or 1xRS485 + 1xRS232
Graphic display 128x64pixel blue with white LED back light
Encoder Mechanical with push button
Clock and Calendar Lithium battery backup
Telemeasures Output: FWD, REF, Alarm
Input: Remote OFF
FIRMWARE UPGRADE
Inside the VEGA exciter there are 5 micro-controllers. One of these is the one of the display board (16bit
Fujitsu with 256K Flash) while 4 are in the audio, video, local oscillator and external reference boards
respectively (8bit Microchip with 8K Flash).
It is possible to upgrade all of the micro-controllers of the exciter, but the procedures differ from the display
one and the remaining four.
All upgrades are made by means of the RS232 connector on the front panel of the exciter.
All of the firmware inside the exciter are made up by two parts: the BIOS and the firmware proper. The
former only programs the built-in Flash memory, while all of the operations of the micro are determined by the