C-More Micro HMI Drawing Tools from AutomationDirect

The C-More Micro software has all the usual drawing aides to help make your job easier on these tool bars. Up here and there are some down here. Note that you can move these – For the purposes of this video, let’s put all of our drawing aide tool bars down here at the bottom. Let’s go take a look at screen 6 down here … If you select a text object like this one, then all of the objects that are applicable to this selection that are currently grayed out, will light up. So let’s click on this object, and sure enough the objects we can use are all turned on. In particular, note that we can change the size of text in that box WITHOUT having to open the dialog and edit the object. That’s a real time saver. If you select a line object, you can quickly adjust the weight, style and whether it has an arrow on one end, the other or both, again I’m just clicking on this button. Once you have selected an object you have all the usual cut, copy and paste operations down here so I can cut it out, paste it back, paste multiple copies, if I didn’t like that I can undo it or re-do it. And make copies instead of cuts and paste those. Let’s undo all of that. If you select a group of objects – lets select these three right here – then the alignment tools become available. This will align all of the objects left sides, this will align their centers, and this will align them all to their right sides. If you select some horizontal objects, like these here, then you can align them to their top edges, centers, or their bottoms. You can also force all objects – lets grab these 3 different sized objects - to be the same size vertically, undo, horizontally , undo, or the same in both directions. You can also group or ungroup objects and use them as if they were just one single object. You can also bring an object to the front, send it to the back, or bring it forward or send it backward one layer at a time. Down here you can turn the grid on, make objects snap to the grid, and change the grid size. It’s currently at 10 pixels; let’s make it 20x20. The grid won’t show up on the user display, this is simply to help you align things when you build your display. Finally, you can zoom to one of 8 levels and even specify your own custom zoom level. This is not a big help on these small 3” screens, but being able to zoom on the hires panels makes your life MUCH easier. One side note – when you select these objects to use these sizing tools, the order in which you select the objects is important. For example, If I select this object first, and then this object, and I say make them both the same size, it will make them all the same size as the first one selected. Let me undo that. Let’s do it the other way. Lets make this the first object, and select these two. Now if I press this button, they all conform to the first object selected. So beware when you are selecting things. That’s about all there is for using the drawing tools – 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!