Siemens HMI Elements

Hi,

I have been playing around with the Siemens HMIs and think that the number of pre-configured elements is very small.

Therefore I would assume there is a way through custom scripting/design to create your own elements like bar displays and dials?

I want to create a HMI layout which is more "modern" than standard grey & white but not sure where to start?

Thanks,

That will be painful. The HMIs do not run multiple scripts in parallel, so animation scripts should be avoided if possible.

If your creative, black magic can get you pretty far in the fancy graphics department. With newer HMIs there are a number of extra graphical options and better screen resolutions, which you should take advantage of.

The things you will find useful:
You can move things around the screen in a horizontal and vertical direction, and set visibility.
There are invisible buttons, and graphic layers.
Newer HMIs have popups and slide in screens.
You have templates and a global screen.
Rotation isn't available (or really well hidden, its hard to tell with TIA).

Add in some imported graphics and you can do a lot to make the screens look pretty. A nice image of a tank fill level moving up and down on a tank graphic can look very good. It is however really complex from a graphics design point of view, and adds significant development time.

Unfortunately you cant write any comments on the screens so you may have fun in a few years time when it needs an upgrade.

Thanks for the info, this is the sort of stuff I have been looking into, I just don't like the fact there is one bar display and all you can do is change the background colors! Oh well...

DLMUK said:

Therefore I would assume there is a way through custom scripting/design to create your own elements like bar displays and dials?

I want to create a HMI layout which is more "modern" than standard grey & white but not sure where to start?
Thanks,

Click to expand...

There is a lot that you can change about the objects, in regards to colors, and they also have styles and style sheets in the newest release of Portal, to allow you some standardization.

However, you can't do any custom objects on the HMI panels (Basic/Comfort). You can make custom objects if you are using a PC based HMI.

Chris Hasler said:

Rotation isn't available (or really well hidden, its hard to tell with TIA).

Click to expand...

The only way I know of to do rotation is to create a graphics list with pre-rotated images of whatever you want to rotate. This works OK for something simple like a fan blade, but can be a lot trickier if you want to rotate an object that needs to have other animations (like colors changing).

Chris Hasler said:

Add in some imported graphics and you can do a lot to make the screens look pretty. A nice image of a tank fill level moving up and down on a tank graphic can look very good. It is however really complex from a graphics design point of view, and adds significant development time.

Click to expand...

I have seen some impressive graphics done, but most of the time, impressive graphics are saved for SCADA systems, or at least PC based HMI's. In the panels, I usually see things being kept simple to minimize work.

mk42 said:

I have seen some impressive graphics done, but most of the time, impressive graphics are saved for SCADA systems, or at least PC based HMI's. .

Click to expand...

What do you mean by PC Based HMIs?

HMI on an industrial PC, see the following link for an example:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&r...YP0Ma3lWM2ULUcv6A&sig2=vTnUIyHEdgixrtxC04v9gQ

I don't work for Parmley Graham by the way, Siemens has two main UK distributors. Underwoods is the other one.