ProcessView+ for the Watlow F4T

Four things only an F4T gets

ProcessView+ reads the controller type at startup and shows only what that controller can actually do. On an F4T, nothing is hidden — and four capabilities appear that no other supported controller offers:

Analog inputs. Additional sensor channels beyond the control loops, brought into the same log, the same charts and the same reports as everything else. This is also the one place the controller changes what a document contains: the QA report’s per-step tolerance table adds a row for each enabled analog input with tolerance monitoring switched on. On any other controller those rows simply do not exist, because the inputs do not.

Alarms 5–8. Eight software alarm channels rather than four.

Open-loop detection. A break in a control loop — a failed heater, a disconnected thermocouple — surfaced as an alarm rather than as a run that quietly never reaches setpoint.

Variables and remote control. Controller variables readable and writable from the software.

Autotune is available too, which among the four controllers is otherwise offered only on the EZ-Zone PM.

The trial is a real F4T integration

Simulation Mode does not mock the software. It runs an in-process Modbus/TCP slave on loopback — one per virtual controller — so the real comms stack does real work: connect, poll, read, write, reconnect. The controller it emulates is an F4T.

That matters more for you than for anyone else reading these pages. If your chamber has an F4T, the free trial is not an approximation of what you would get. It is the same integration against a virtual instance of the same controller, and you can drive profiles, log data, generate QA reports and run the Part 11 signing ceremony before a single cable is connected.

Simulated activity is deliberately kept out of the regulated audit trail — records go to an ephemeral store that is cleared on every launch — while a bookend pair, Simulation Mode entered and Simulation Mode exited, is written to the real trail. A reviewer sees no unexplained gap, and can tell exactly when the system was not in regulated operation.

Two loops, and what runs on top

An F4T in a chamber typically drives temperature and humidity. ProcessView+ tracks both as first-class loops with their own setpoints, process values and tolerance bands, and the per-step tolerance evaluation applies to each independently — so a humidity excursion during a soak is caught exactly like a temperature one, and lands in the same excursion table.