The next task is to configure your I/O channels. There are several steps. First, you either auto-sense physically connected cards or add I/O card placeholders using DeltaV Explorer. Then you enable the channels on the cards and define the Device Tag for each channel. The Device Tags are the names the DeltaV software uses in the control modules to identify the input and output instruments and hardware devices like transmitters, valves, and so on.
In the tank example used in the tutorial, there are four I/O cards installed in the following order: Analog In, Analog Out, Discrete In, and Discrete Out. If you have a real system set up, your I/O cards may not have been installed in this order. You may not even have some of these card types. Therefore, to be able to do the tutorial I/O configuration procedures, you will need to configure a controller placeholder, as described in the previous section. You can learn the general I/O card configuration steps by reading this section.
Each I/O card has eight channels, not all of which will necessarily be used. The following table lists the Device Tags for the tank process examples.
Usually, the I/O cards are already downloaded and auto-sensed when you define the controller node, and you can go directly to the procedure for configuring the first channel on the first I/O card. However, if you need to add a card or a placeholder, go to the procedure for adding a card or placeholder.