C-more Micro HMI Simulator Tutorial from AutomationDirect

The Simulator allows you to develop and test your project before transferring it to the panel. This is great because you don’t even need to have a working PLC to create your panel project. Once you have something to test, like this project here, you can start the simulator either by clicking on the simulate button on the file tool bar, going to the file menu and saying “Simulation” or just hitting this big SIMULATE button right here. It asks if you want to save the project – yes we do – builds the project and then pops up the simulator. Two Windows appear – the simulator Control Window, and the C-More Micro Simulation. The control window gives a behind the scenes view of the project. Here you can see a list of the active screens in your project – looks like we have 17 screens in this project - and you can click on a screen to bring it up in the simulator. The speaker icon enables/disables beeps, the magnifying glass zooms the simulation window and the bezel button enables the various optional bezels – let’s reduce the size of this so we can see those – so each time you click on it, it brings up a different optional keypad bezel depending on the panel you have chosen. Since the three inch panels have both the numeric keypad entry and the directional arrow bezel you get those. If this was a six inch panel, you would get his dedicated keypad bezels – one of which is a landscape and the other is a portrait mode bezel. The 4” panel doesn’t have any bezels, so you would only see the basic panel something like this – and you would also have the option of viewing it with no bezel at all. This Tag list show you every tag being used on the current screen – not in the entire project. For example – If I change screens here you can see the tag list changes for each screen. Let’s bring up a longer list of TAGs here … Note that you can sort any of the columns by clicking on the column header. You can sort by name, PLC address, the type of data or even the value if you want to. The simulation window acts just like a real panel. If you specified a touch screen in your project, then you can click on objects on the screen and they behave just like you would expect. The Function keys and bezel keys all work exactly like you would expect on a real panel. You can even hear the beeps and see the LEDs light up when you press the buttons. Note that on a real panel to get to the setup screen for programming, you have to press both the F1 and F5 keys at the same time. You can’t do that with a mouse pointer, so the simulator allows you simulate that by Right clicking and selecting Go To SETUP MENU – that does the same thing as pressing both F1 and F5 at the same time for 3 seconds. You can also enable disable beeps, zoom and select available bezels by right clicking … these do the same thing as these buttons on the control window. The simulator does such a great job of testing the functionality of the panel, we use it in almost every one of the How To Videos in this series. That’s all there is to the simulator– be sure to check out the other videos in this series. And as always, please send us any topics you would like to see covered – or - any other comments for that matter – we appreciate the feedback