Creating a task

As we have learned so far in this chapter, organizational units within RSLogix and Studio 5000 provide a much-needed logical structure to our projects. They also allow us to prioritize critical tasks within our project.

In the following exercise, we will create a task that periodically monitors an important alarm condition within our application:

1. In the Controller Organizer pane, right-click on the Tasks icon, and then click on New Task...:

In our project, there is no need to check for non-critical alarms by the default periodic task time of every 10 ms. We will create a new periodic task for processing alarms every 250 ms and give it low priority in order to reduce the load on our processor.

2. In the New Task form that appears, enter the following values:
   • Name: AlarmTask
   • Description: Task for calculating alarm conditions
   • Type: Periodic
   • Period: 250.000 ms
   • Priority: 11
   • Watch Dog...