C-more Micro HMI Analog Meter from AutomationDirect

This object monitors the TAG you specify and shows the result on a good old fashioned analog style meter. This meter is monitoring this Temperature TAG, so lets change that to 35… sure enough the needle on the graph moves to 35. This looks even better on the color screens where we can have multiple color alarm bands … and have a lot more area to work with …. The 4” and 6” panels have 9 times the screen area of a three inch panel. To set up an Analog meter, just double click or drag the Analog Meter onto the screen. I’m going to move this dialog out of the way so we can see the meter on the screen as we change things. You can add a label, you can choose to show the divisions or not. You can turn numbers and division’s on and off, Change the number of divisions, the range of the display, which way the needle rotates, and the look of the meter. If you show the divisions, you can choose to show major and minor divisions, and whether you want tic numbers or not … you can adjust the range of the scale on the meter … you can choose to have the needle move clockwise or counter clockwise… and even the color of the needle. And you have 8 different styles to choose from. All you really need to do is specify a TAG for this meter to monitor. We’ll just use the temperature TAG. Note that you can test this analog meter using the little mini simulator. We’ll type a 35, 77, … you got the idea. Looks like we’re ready to go, hit OK, Simulate, save the changes, and up pops the simulator with our analog meter. We just pretend we are the PLC and modify this TAG … and the result shows up on the screen. If we type a large value like 95 … the needle moves up into the alarm band. Can we adjust that alarm band? Sure! Let’s go take a look. On this tab of the dialog, we can disable, or enable the alarm band … and we can change the value of the alarm band. Lets change this one to 50, hit ok, and there’s our new alarm band. Let’s flip this project over to a 4” Color panel … To do that we go to the navigation windows function tab … panel manager … change the model number to a four inch color, say OK, It’s asking – do we want to leave all of the objects that we currently have at the same size? We’ll say sure. And here is our 4 inch color panel. If we double click on our graph, we see that we have more color options now. Our division colors can be anything we want, our needle colors can be anything we want – lets change that to RED – but more importantly we now have 5 different alarm bands we can specify. Note that the lower alarm bands – we’ll turn those on – these numbers are upper limits. This says BLUE will go from zero to 20 … and yellow will go from 20 to 40. The High alarms – we need to change out high alarm to something bigger than 50 … let’s make it 80 … I’m going to flip away and back to get that to settle in … so now the high alarm starts at 60 – that is the GREEN starts at 60 and goes to 80 … and our high alarm – which we will change to RED … goes from 80 to 100. So, let’s go ahead and say OK, simulate, save the project … and up pops our new color analog meter on our 4 inch color panel with our new red needle. Let’s have our needle move up to 50 … and the meter shows us the result instantly. It’s important to understand that the alarm bands we specified are only a visual queue – they don’t actually affect alarms, status, beeps or anything else. That’s it for this video – be sure to check out all of 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!