C-more Micro HMI Bottling Plant 3: Fans & Lights from AutomationDirect

If we press the FAN button we go to the Fans and Lights screen. On this screen we can press the rocker switches to control the Fans or we can enable the function keys to do the same thing, We can click on this button to go to the Lights screen where we can Turn on the lights. There’s also a little indicator with each switch to highlight which lights are on or off. Notice that in general on all screens F1 always takes us back to the home screen – it is important to have consistency in your projects like that to make it easier for your user to navigate. Lets see how all of this fits together … If we bring up our Fan Control Page we see we have for standard rocker switches which are just 4 regular switches chosen from this pallet right here. Down here we have some static text to remind the user that the rocker switches can also be controlled via the Function keys. The text doesn’t actually do anything, that was done back here in the rocker switch when we assigned the function key to this rocker switch, and F3 to that one, and F4 to that one ... The HOME button is a static bitmap sitting on top of a screen change button and that screen change button says to go back to screen number 1. Likewise the Lights button is also a static bitmap sitting on top of another screen change button that says go to screen 17, which is our lights screen – you can see the name of the screen is right here: Lighting Control. We’ll go to screen 17: There’s our lighting control screen – very similar to the FAN CONTROL screen. We can turn the lights on and off using standard switches right out of the pallet here. This switch is controlling a lane select tag. When it does that, this indicator is monitoring the same TAG so it changes state from ON to OFF. Up here we have our HOME button which can also be controlled by F1 – and our FAN button F2. This is just some static text here. These little ON and OFF labels are just static text to help the user identify what the different states of the switch mean. This screen uses a rectangle shape object to group everything associated with Light 1 – it helps draw the users focus to everything associated with this switch. Those drawing objects are located up here under the shape object pallet. Notice that both the Lights and Fans screens are Yellow – that’s another important tip – group screens that perform similar functions by screen color – it gives users another thing to key off of as they navigate through the project. If we go to the home screen, then hit the F3 button or this icon right here it takes us to the status screen which is simply setup to monitor PLC TAGs. These bar graphs simply monitor the contents of these TAGs. Lets take a look at that. We need to go find that screen – which is easiest if you look at the simulation control window, it tells us we are on screen 8. Let’s go find screen 8 which we know is orange. And there it is. Most of these are just static text blocks. Note that while you can’t rotate text in a C-More Micro project, there is nothing preventing you from stacking the text vertically like this. Notice that the scales on the bar graphs are bitmaps – turned out it was easier to get the scale we needed by creating our own scale rather than using the automatic one with the bar graph so we just turned those off here in the bar graph. So if we look at each bar graph, all of the labels and tic marks are turned off. Once again F1 is set to return us to the home screen, but this time F2 is set to take us back to the previous screen – so this is a screen change button, that is set to go to the previous screen - that’s whichever screen we last visited. Also notice that we have F5 setup as a secret key that will take us to screen 12. Screen 12 is a little screen we have in the background that allows us to adjust the values of the TAGs that the bar graphs are monitoring. This allows us to modify the TAG values when the panel is not connected to a PLC. So let’s check all of that out – let’s go back to our simulator … here’s all of our bar graphs monitoring these TAGs … we’ve already seen that F5 takes us to this screen where we can adjust the bar graph values … this is just changing the values of these TAGs. Let’s look at this first TAG right here – that 21 – we can change that using the increment decrement operator. Once I’m done with that I can go back to the stats graph and see the results. In the next video we cover the Conveyor control and recipes screen. That’s it for this video – 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