FT View Studio

Hello all, I have a question for you. I am wondering how to tie an objects horizontal and vertical position to an analog tag (from an encoder) to make it move across a conveyor belt on the PV screen. I think I should tie the encoder input to an N file in the PLC and reference this in my PV expression. Is this correct? Trying to get it right without having to actually having to set up a PLC to test. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Animate the object via the Horizontal or vertical position.
Select the object, right click->animate->

Right, but I am wondering about how to reference the expression. I have never tried to make an object slide. I have made things move (jump positions), appear as a pop-up, etc. but moving steady across a conveyor belt is new to me. Will it work to the way I suggested (using an N file tied to the encoder count as my reference for the animation expression)?

You can use your encoder, you'll just have to translate/scale the expected encoder range to pixel positions on your window, which you do in the animate horizontal or vertical position selection in FT SE. However, more would need to be known about this encoder value. Does it automatically rollover from 0 to X, then back to 0 again? Is there only one part on the conveyor at a time?

If multiple parts, you could instead use a boolean shift register that's the length of the conveyor in time splices. Shift the shift register for each pulse of the encoder. Load the shift register beginning each time a new part shows up. In that case, you could have multiple parts on the belt. Just use visibility on your SE screen with a widget in each shift register location that turns on when the corresponding position in the shift register is true.

Use the pixel settings with the Min/Max values for the tag you are using.

Your expression will simply be the name of the tag you wish to use for animation.

For example...in the attached image, as the N7:10 value ranges from 0 to 500 the animated object will move from it's base position to a position 350 pixels to the right.

So at zero it will be in it's base position on the screen. At 500 it will be 350 pixels to the right. As the value varies between 0 and 500 then it's position will also vary between zero position and 350 pixels.

OG

You cannot quite make it slide, however, you could duplicate it, "connect" it to the required number of tags, place it in several positions along your intended "slide path" and then use the Visibility Animation feature conditioned by a Compare (>, <, =) expresion of your encoder's values.

Thanks to all. Looks like I can make it work just fine with the information you all provided. I really appreciate it.

255.255.255.0 said:

Thanks to all.

Click to expand...

Who was that "masked" man

OG

Operaghost said:

Who was that "masked" man

OG

Click to expand...

I saw what you did there!

Just a suggestion, when using animations on HMI's, it is usually a Very Good Practice to normalize the value sent to the HMI. Since I deal almost exclusively in REAL datatypes, I generally normalize a position to be 0 to 100.0%, if you were dealing in integers, you might want to make the normalized range 0 to 1000.

Using the actual raw number for an HMI animation is just a pain, especially if you use several different types / sizes of HMI.