C-more Micro HMI Bottling Plant 4: Conveyers & Recipes from AutomationDirect

Pressing F4 or clicking on the Conveyor button takes us to the conveyor control screen. This one is straight forward – we just have 4 standard switches right from the existing parts list each controlling a different TAG. There is also a standard graphic indicator for each that tracks the same TAG to help highlight the status of the switch. Each of these switches is mapped to a function key here so you can either use the Function Key or the switch on the screen. And there is the usual HOME button which is mapped to F1 to get us back to the home screen. The recipe button takes us to a screen that allows us to change the bottle size on each lane and also takes us to a screen that allows us to adjust the mix of each flavor. Looks like this is screen 10 and the mix screen is screen 14. Notice that the two screens are both the same color – keeping similar functions the same color helps the user navigate around complicated projects. Lets take a look at these two screens – 10 and 14. First screen 10 – the bottle size screen. Here we have a dynamic bitmap button – that doesn’t make any sense – does it? A dynamic bit map just monitors a tag – it doesn’t change anything. Well, if we move that out of the way we can see there is a recipe button underneath that is doing all of the work. Since a recipe button can only display text though, we put a dynamic bitmap on top of it to give us a graphics representation. That’s important – with the C-More micro you can stack objects to create any effect you want. Be careful with stacking objects though .. only the top most object under a bitmap will function. Let’s do a little side example: on screen 18 we have a bitmap covering two objects – this pushbutton sets the alarm tag, and this switch that is on top of it changes the cola tag. Because the switch is sitting on top of the pushbutton, if we click on this area under this graphic, only the cola TAG will get modified the alarm TAG wont. The portion of the alarm pushbutton that was exposed in this region will set the alarm TAG. Lets try that: Most of this area is covered by the Cola TAG, so when I click on this Graphic, as you can see, only the cola TAGA is changing. If I move my cursor up to the region where only the Alarm button was exposed, then the Alarm TAG gets set, but the Cola TAG doesn’t. That’s important to understand – the only objects that work are the ones that are visible under the graphic. If we look at that recipe in this recipe button, we can see that it is selecting the different lanes but it is also DESELCTIG the other buttons. It’s turning this button ON and these other buttons OFF. That gives us the effect of a radio button but with the flexibility of a recipe. The lanes numbers are just static text. So we have static text and dynamic bitmaps sitting on top of recipe buttons. Let’s look at the sizes – it’s another dynamic bitmap which only monitors a TAG – it doesn’t change anything, so chances are if we move that out of the way … we’ll find yet another recipe button. This one works just like the other one - it sets its TAG to ON and the other three to OFF to give us the effect of a radio button BUT, unlike the radio button, this allows us to use any graphic we want as an indicator – that’s a neat trick! Over here we have a static bitmap, some static text, all stacked on top of a screen change button. That screen change button takes us to screen 14 where we can adjust the mix. Let’s go pop down to screen 14. On this screen we are using the same trick as before to create the effect of a radio button with these four items. If we look at this we have a rectangle – which I am going to push to the bottom to get it out of our way – we have some static text. If I move the Dynamic Bitmap and static text out of the way, there’s our recipe button again. The Recipe Button is updating the recipe, but it is also turning off the other three items and turning himself on. That gives us the effect of a Radio Button and updates all of the ingredients of this recipe. The results are displayed using a numeric entry objects. This is important to understand – the numeric ENTRY is being used as a display – that way you can both display the current TAG AND change it! Please note that this is a very simple example – for this to work in a real application there would need to be some PLC interaction with this numeric entry result. It’s real easy to hard code values using a recipe button like we are showing in these examples, actually getting the PLC to interact with these numeric entry results is a subject for an entire video all by itself. We’ll have to add that to the list … The rest of these items are just static text. We have our home icon over our screen change button to take us back to screen 1. Our bottle size button is a screen change which takes us back to screen 10. On top of that we are sacking some static bitmaps, some little bottles, and some static text. That’s really important to understand with the C-More Micro – you can stack any objects to create any effect you want. So let’s go back to our simulator one more time and take a look at this. So remember – when you click on this button here, it clears the other buttons via the recipe to give us the effect of a radio button. Same thing back here on the mix screen. If I click on one, it clears all the others to give us that effect of a radio button. And each time I do this it updates the recipe on the right. If I click on this display, it allows me to update these numbers. 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