Here's a quick look at the advantages of high performance HMI. www.scadatorch.com Rockwell Automation PDF on high performance HMI: www.rockwellau... High performance HMI Handbook: www.amazon.com...
So the problems I face are similar to the ones mention; the sales team and upper management wanting better looking screens while the industry only needs the most relevant information. I work as what I call an In-house integrator for a company who produces lines for manufactures to produce consumer products; we build a piece of equipment that makes a product. The equipment we build is all very similar and we commission a new controls system nearly weekly, therefor the screens we use are nearly identical for every line and they are a major sales point for our lines. I agree, HMI/SCADA screens should be boring and relevant. But that is not a realistic goal for interrogators; having that stance and only excepting that stance is going to do nothing but create a stalemate between groups that should be working together. Sales needs a product to sale, and we need the work. The biggest problem I have is getting input from anyone on what is undesirable and what does work. There has to be give and take from either side and we need to find a way to make our systems stand out and still be easy and intuitive to use. Now, Color blindness is a real issue; I totally agree! We have many in our own company on the floor working with these products daily who are color blind and, at least here, the majority seem to be veterans for some reason. However, I am not color blind and I find the the opinions above and from those I work with are as one sided as the opinions in the entire industry from the none color blind. Neither argument works; we cannot build everything vibrant nor can we build everything flat; we need to find common ground and use a color pallet that appeals to all involved. I like the idea of showing time based trends, the object used above may not work for all applications though; I don't really have a suggestion and I think the solution would be a case by case basis, it is something I am going to investigate for our lines though. The radar graph is not intuitive to me at all and would require explanation for new users, it also takes up more space than is required for that information; using color to indicate desired ranges works but while the muted colors may stand out to you, they do not stand out to me. I understand where you are coming from on popup screens, however I feel user initiated popups are fine whether they are from a screen action or prompted by a PLC process based on a user action. But those screens are fine to "temporally" cover a portion of the main screen; I do agree that their time should be short, they should not be be able to take over the screens (unless that is their intent), and if needed faults should take the user back to the main screen or a fault acknowledge screen. This is a trend I see in the Controls Automation industry, engineers saying "This is how it has to be and there is no other way for it be anything else". I have come into the industry from another industry and the narrow mind set I have encountered has been frustrating. And it's really no ones fault, it's industry culture; it's the mindset passed down; but it's time to step back and rethink that mindset. it's time to find alternate solutions; No, these are not smart phones, but our operators are conditioned by the smart phone culture. And what is intuitive to an engineer probably is not intuitive to an operator.
Good morning! This is a very important topic for optimized operator use and response. The link for the Rockwell design guide in the description is not working - do you have a resource for HMI design for non-process applications, such as packaging machines or robot cells, where there aren't process controls in play, just product handling operations? Thanks!
Do you mean the navigation tabs at the top? That's a tab component. If you like the project layout I'm using, it's the tabbed north skeleton project. It's an option from the drop down when you create a project when you first open the designer.
@@scadatorch2211 No I mean the popup window that appear in right side of the screen that you called dock window. You use it instead of popup. How did you resize the main screen for fitting dock window? Can you provide a download link for this sample project?
To create a docked window, just create a new window, and with the window container selected in the project browser, you can change its dock position in the property editor (the property is ‘dock position’). In this case you would set it to east if you want it to appear on the right. They also have some documentation and a video on the subject: docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC79/Docked+Windows+-+Axis+Precedence+and+Dock+Index Next, to achieve the result you are describing, you would have to set up a script that opens that window when the x position of the cursor is greater than some number, and closes the window when it is less than some number. I can’t send you the project unfortunately as it has a lot of proprietary stuff. I am available on a freelance basis though if you need help with designing your Ignition project.
