XXL Industrial HMI 💲💣

Hi all,
I'm looking at upgrading a 30-year old hopper/feeder/weigher blending system that is run from a control room via a massive jungle of selector switches, pots, pushbuttons and pilot lights. All of the blower and hopper systems are color-coded by the lenses on the buttons and lights. Status and alarms for a component are indicated through light pulses of various frequencies. It's one of those systems that seems totally incomprehensible at first, but after you get used to it (or become hypnotized by it) you realize that the operators can glean a lot of information at a glance from across the control room. The key thing is that they can tell everything they need about the system without having to get up and go look at a bunch of monitors.
This interface is big. It completely covers two large panel doors. Probably an 8' x 6' area overall. All PLC-5 I/O and obsolete AB switches. Management wants Controllogix and would like all the io replaced with HMI screens. Of course mgmt folks want pretty P&ID type overview screens, broken down into separate screens for separate functions. Every sketch I've shown to the operators for a 15" Crimson screen they've hated. TOO SMALL! they cry. Our entire operation hinges on these guys being able to make quick smart decisions, so I really don't care how cool looking the screens might be, if they don't help the operator out.
To that end, I am now looking for ways to recreate an enhanced version of the interface they already have and understand. Making the screen is simple. The trick is making it readable. I'm thinking I'd need at least a 60" display to make it viable. In this case it needs to be an interface and not just a monitor.

I'm looking for suggestions or examples here. I'd like to go with a ProducTVity or something similar, it it could take touch feedback. I'm also thinking of Advanced HMI running on something like this. I'm surprised that there isn't more of a niche for this sort of thing, really.

What do you guys think? A 65" HMI - am I chasing windmills?

Thanks,
Dustin

I wish I had snapped a photo of the Wichita Falls water treatment plant control room. They used an array of moderately large TV monitors in a nice clean mounting frame up high at one end of a room. about ten feet away there were two long "lauch control" looking tables with about 5 or 6 workstations each with a monitor, mouse, keyboard. They ran FTView Studio I believe. I was there for a RO membrane conference, not controls work. It was very well put together. I did see one of the guys on the back row editing graphics and what was either RSView or FTView (probably SE distributed).

The monitors showed the whole plant and I think that a couple of them cycled through views of some detailed screens of each section of the whole operation. It looked like control options, settings, buttons, etc were all handled at the desks via mouse and keyboard. If you go with multiple monitors, you can get the same effect, achieve pseudo-redundancy in case one screen goes haywire, and the cost each of a (for example) 42" HD tv is reasonable.

Is Advanced HMI ready for "prime time"? I am itching to use Ignition. I just did what is hopefully my last FTView Studio app for a while and even though it was supposed to be easy to import an old RSView32 app, it still took too many hours for me to get it working right and add a few screens. Productivity Station would probably be a pleasure to deal with if you only need one monitor or can use multiple PTV units. I love Crimson 3. Last week on short notice for a job in Texas, I set up a DSP for logging and replicated a very busy screen (virtual HMI) with a total of about 3 hours work from first laying eyes on the acd file and made it look almost identical to a PVc1000 HMI they already had. Red Lion stuff is about as close as you will get to plug and play.

OkiePC said:

Is Advanced HMI ready for "prime time"?

Click to expand...

My opinion and suggestions of course would be biased, so I'll just list some of the real stats:

Averages 1725 downloads per month (from 61 countries) based on last 12 months
700+ members registered on the AdvancedHMI forum with 650+ topics
One of the longest threads on this forum with 837 replies
50+ personal deployments (1 plant I am helping with will be adding 25 more to their existing 15 over the next 6 months)
Several videos by users posted on YouTube by users
Confirmed applications in 7+ countries. The download stats show a download from a great deal more, but I don't want to give a potentially inflated number unless I have seen them either first hand, pictures, or assisted with the app

The longest running app that I have been directly involved in ran continuous for over 14 months 24/7 before it was rebooted. The only reason for the reboot was a background app stopped responding, but AdvancedHMI was still running perfect.

I have personally been in 5+ facilities where users other than myself have had active deployments in production critical applications.

As for performance, the ControlLogix driver has been going through some testing and single DINT updates have been shown as fast as 4ms. An update to the driver currently in testing is showing 100 mixed DINTs (not an array) to update at an average rate of 7ms. That's a theoretical read of 14,000 DINTs/second.

Any PC-based HMI can do this. Just output to a TV screen. It wont even be expensive.
If it has to be an industrial 50" or 60" monitor, then it will be expensive !

Btw, you may want to have several TV screens rather than just one. Any PC nowadays support at least 2 monitors, and with a special (inexpensive) graphics card 4 or even more screens.
The question is if the HMI you intend to use can be used with more than 1 screen.

I did a water plant upgrade a few years ago where I replaced an old control cabinet with two 50" displays showing operating info (tank levels, flow rates, pump status, etc.) and had a dual-monitor workstation for actual operator interface and control. It looked very clean, and the operators were very happy with it. This was all running Ignition (server on the workstation, small Linux boxes running clients to drive the large displays.) It would have been fantastic to have the large displays allow touch interface as well, but alas, it wasn't feasible at the time.

Archie said:

My opinion and suggestions of course would be biased, so I'll just list some of the real stats:

Averages 1725 downloads per month (from 61 countries) based on last 12 months
700+ members registered on the AdvancedHMI forum with 650+ topics
One of the longest threads on this forum with 837 replies
50+ personal deployments (1 plant I am helping with will be adding 25 more to their existing 15 over the next 6 months)
Several videos by users posted on YouTube by users
Confirmed applications in 7+ countries. The download stats show a download from a great deal more, but I don't want to give a potentially inflated number unless I have seen them either first hand, pictures, or assisted with the app

The longest running app that I have been directly involved in ran continuous for over 14 months 24/7 before it was rebooted. The only reason for the reboot was a background app stopped responding, but AdvancedHMI was still running perfect.

I have personally been in 5+ facilities where users other than myself have had active deployments in production critical applications.

As for performance, the ControlLogix driver has been going through some testing and single DINT updates have been shown as fast as 4ms. An update to the driver currently in testing is showing 100 mixed DINTs (not an array) to update at an average rate of 7ms. That's a theoretical read of 14,000 DINTs/second.

Click to expand...

Get that logging feature added, and trending, and I will for sure give it a trial run.

I am glad you responded, and biased or not, I respect your input, and admire your work. I remember some of your first posts here and how many tried to talk you out of your goal. But unlike many others, your work not only became fully functional, but has been ongoing.

I was talking to my boss the other day about you and AdvancedHMI. He said "Free? Really? Why? How does he make money?"

I am glad it is still free, and greatly admire your persistence in getting it done and constantly improving it. I hope my comment did not irritate you, but "Free? Really?" often means it is flawed, too limited and may actually scare away users.

This is just my opinion, but if you add data logging and trending, and it is really THAT easy to use, you need to make a $99 version so we skeptics will respect it more. That is less than half the cost of any other SCADA runtime only license I know of.

I know that opens up a can of licensing worms and what not, and like I said, it is just my opinion.

Carry on Archie. Keep up the good work.

And I must disclaim that I have not set up a working AdvancedHMI project. I did download one of the earliest versions and hit some minor obstacle getting it running and set it aside. One of these days when I am all caught up

OkiePC said:

"Free? Really? Why? How does he make money?"

I am glad it is still free, and greatly admire your persistence in getting it done and constantly improving it. I hope my comment did not irritate you, but "Free? Really?" often means it is flawed, too limited and may actually scare away users.

Click to expand...

I 100% agree, "free" is very bad for marketing software. In the HMI/SCADA market, even $99 can cast a not so good image of the software quality.

The question of how it can be free and how I make money comes up quite frequently. The short answer is that I do not make the majority from the software directly, but by using the software. And what I mean by that is when I do projects, whether just an HMI, or a complete system, I use AdvancedHMI without the feature restriction or license hassles dealt with from commercial packages. For example, in one situation I created a plant facility monitoring system. The facility owner saw it and asked how he could get it on his PC. A typical HMI software user would have to answer the question as "you will need to purchase an additional license for $xxx and then it will have to be ordered, and then installed on your PC." My answer was "I can put it on your PC right now or I can put it on your network and anyone with access to the drive can have the application". I know there will be the counter argument of using a web based HMI, but have you ever went to an IT department and said "I am putting a web server on your network and you will have to maintain after I leave"

As for the reason of making the software free is because it creates a win-win situation for myself and the users. The users will use the software in scenarios that I will never use it in, therefore may find bugs and report back to me. I can fix the bug, give the user an update and then have a known more stable software when I go to use it in a similar application.

The one stipulation for it being free (some may consider it a catch) is that the finished application must be made available to the end user in its full source (GPL License). There are 2 reasons for that. The first is because nothing is more frustrating than receiving a system that is proprietary or restricted from being able to make changes. The second is the principal of "self-proliferating" marketing. If the end user has full access to the project, then they may make changes and be exposed to the software to see how flexible and easy it is and possibly become another user.

Here is something to consider that possibly no commercial software can offer. Have you ever been using software and just wish it had a certain feature? if you go to the software company and propose the feature, what is the possibility of getting it and how long would it take to get a new version with it? Frequently AdvancedHMI users will ask for or suggest a feature and maybe 80% of the time, the feature will become part of the software within a couple weeks. More complex features in high demand do eventually end up in the software, but just take more development time.

It has been the users that have truly made the software what it is by them using it and providing the feedback.

They had that an Beer plant here in CA. They replaced them with big screen monitors with iFix (yuck) running them. Then they had smaller monitors running the process. Operators seemed to like them especially with the smaller monitors to run the actual system.