Way to advance the time/date in the simulator

[TravisB]

I have some BASIC code which takes action based on the change of day, and month, and year at midnight each day. I'm wondering if there is a way I can run the simulator and advance the date/time to midnight, to the end of the month, and to the end of the year so I can see if all of my actions are occuring as expected.

[garysdickinson]

The simulator Time/date variables are normally loaded with the time/date of the PC when the simulation is started.

You can change the simulators time/date variables when you have the if you click on the "VIEW" button in  them simulator.

Click on the "Edit" button to bring up the "View Variables - Integers" dialog.

If you want to set the simulator time to 23:59:00 you will have to type "TIME[1]=23" and press enter to set the hours to 23.

TIME[2] sets the minutes and TIME[3] accesses the seconds.

DATE[1..4] allows you to change the Year, Month, Day and Day of Week values.

Please be aware that the TIME[] and DATE[] registers can change as your is reading them.  If the time is 23:59:59 it is possible for your TBASIC code may read it as 23:59:59 but if you are unlucky you may read the time as 23:59:00.  Newer PLC families have addressed this issue with the STATUS(18) mechanism.

You may want to look at some sample code that I shows how to set/clear RELAYS base on the RTC without getting glitches.


http://www.tri-plc.com/trilogi/RTCAppByGDK.zip

Please note that the sample code did not worry about the date.  You should take the same precautions with the DATE[] values as I did time the TIME[] values.


Gary D

[support]

For a quicker test you can write a test custom function to set the TIME[n] and DATE[n] to a value several seconds just before the target date and time and then you can observe what happen when the time is up.

[TravisB]

Thanks Gary, and thanks support!

Works wonderfully.