6.5.6. GPIO

The following uses can be made of a GPIO board:

  • The start and stop of recording on a channel can be triggered by a GPIO board input signal. (For more information, see Recording Interfaces.) The logic of GPIO-triggered recording can be customized using the custom script feature.

  • A recorder alert can trigger a GPIO output signal. Alerts of severity 3 or 4 (Error or Severe) will by default trigger a signal on the first output pair of the board. Further customization is possible via a custom integration script available from Eventide.

License Required

This feature must be licensed to be used. Contact your Eventide Dealer for assistance.

To configure an alarm output, go to the NexLog Configuration Manager: Alerts and Logs menu, and select GPIO. For each GPIO board in the system there will be an entry on the page with a description of the board, like “Contec PCI-E (DIO-48D-PE),” the number of the physical slot the board in installed in, and the pin count for each board.

Click on the Edit Board button for the board you want to configure. For each Pin Block (1-A Port [1-8], 1-B [9-15], 1-C Port (Low)[16-19], etc) you can select the I/O mode to either be Input or Output.

For each input pins, you can configure channels that should record when the pin is active. This can be a single channel, or a comma-delimited list of channels. One limitation: channels can only be controlled by one pin, so you cannot set pin 1 to control 1,2,3 and pin 2 to control 2, because 2 is already configured for pin 1. When configuring a pin for input, the channels configured’s GPIO pin field on the Recording Interfaces page is set, but the detect type still needs to be manually changed to GPIO.

You can configure pins to trigger an output when an alert of a certain severity or above is triggered. The alert severities in escalating order are Info, Warning, Error, and Severe. If configured to alert on Warning or above, the pin will be off if an info alert happens but on for any other kind of alert. You can also configure a relay closure only for unacknowledged alarms of those types.

The relay can also be activated by the recorder just being powered on, it will remain active while the recorder is on and turn off when shutdown. If you want a specific alert code to trigger the output go to the Alert Codes page and find the code you want. For example, alert code 6001 is for a degraded RAID. Enter 6001 in the Alarm Code entry field and click Add.

Multiple rules can be configured for each output, and using boolean logic, these rules are OR’ed together. For example, you may configure Minimum Alert Severity to be SEVERE, and Minimum Unacknoledged Alert Severity to WARNING. In this case, an alert of type ERROR will trigger the pin, but acknowledging it will turn off the pin, but an alert of SEVERITY will cause the pin to trigger until the alert is resolved. The only rule that cannot be combined with other rules is Always On. The pin is always active while the recorder is on if Always On is set, so it does not make sense to use with other rules, as it will never turn off.