PanelView Plus Screensaver

Do you mean, stop it from ever turning on?

If you don´t want it to appear then you could just disable it in:
Terminal Settings -> Display -> Screen Saver

That will stop it appearing in the first place. If you want to disable it remotely as in to show an Alarm or something, I´m not sure if that's possible or not.
 
On a PC I have used an tag based event to trigger mouse movement VBA code, perhaps there is similar code available since it is a windows based panelview.
 
The problem is that the Screensaver is an operating system feature, and it's not tied into FactoryTalk View ME.

I have explored this pretty thoroughly and have not found a way to turn off the Screen Saver function via a PLC or FactoryTalk View ME event.

I chose instead to not use the Screen Saver, but rather to do a 'roll your own' idle screen detector, and use the PLC to set the Display Intensity when I detect that nobody has pressed a button or changed displays for a period of time.

It would be nice if you could do a "pointer jiggle" or similar OS function based on a PLC tag state, but I've never seen it done on a PanelView Plus.
 
It's disappointing to hear Ken has already explored this and not found a solution, I wanted to dig into this, but history has shown that if Ken didn't find it, all hope is lost.
 
The problem is that the Screensaver is an operating system feature, and it's not tied into FactoryTalk View ME.

I have explored this pretty thoroughly and have not found a way to turn off the Screen Saver function via a PLC or FactoryTalk View ME event.

I chose instead to not use the Screen Saver, but rather to do a 'roll your own' idle screen detector, and use the PLC to set the Display Intensity when I detect that nobody has pressed a button or changed displays for a period of time.

It would be nice if you could do a "pointer jiggle" or similar OS function based on a PLC tag state, but I've never seen it done on a PanelView Plus.

Sorry to dig up an old post, but I am trying to accomplish the same thing.

Ken, what are you using to determine inactivity? I have looked into using the 'inactivity time remaining' tag, but it seems to just keep cycling from the inactivity period value down to zero, then back to the inactivity period value down to zero, and repeat.
 
Probably something along the lines of monitoring the active display number and restarting a timer if it changes. That'd be the simplest. I believe that the numeric entries have a "Enter" connection as well that turns a tag on when a value is entered. That could also restart the timer. That and the long way around of having every pushbutton also restart the timer.
 
I think these models have USB ports for external keyboards. Maybe you could use a PLC output to create or simulate a keyboard press. Use a character that doesn't affect the application.
Basic: solenoid presses key on hidden keyboard
Intermediate: gut a keyboard, put electronics in small box, relay connects points that a key would
Advanced: maybe there's an existing device to send a string through USB
Or a mouse click or movement?
 
keshik, Ya, I thought about that, but the problem is how do I restore the brightness once they try to use the HMI again? If I kill the brightness, they won't be able to see/do anything in order to reset the PLC inactivity timer. I'm assuming Ken has found a way to get activity status out of the HMI terminal to the PLC.

5618, this is a temporary solution until we can solve a larger issue, so I'd rather not get too complicated.

Thank you both. Hopefully Ken will have time to chime in with how he accomplished this.
 
The other thing that you could do when you kill the brightness is also force a new popup on the PV from the PC. This screen would just be a giant "close display" button that also had an "On Close" script that writes a value to the PLC to reset the timer (the screen would close itself).
 
Change Display Brightness

Perhaps this RA Knowledge Base will help...

63659 - PanelView Plus: Change Display Brightness During Runtime Using Global Connections
Access Level: TechConnect
 
After dwelling on it, yeah the keyboard is a bit crazy. To implement something like this, I would probably find a way to wiggle a mouse, ideally with some actuator already used elsewhere in the facility.
 
On the system that I used the brightness control, I considered a Display change to be "activity". I used a Global Connection to write the Display number to the controller, and ran an ordinary PLC timer to monitor that value remaining constant.

The "Screen Saver" display was an On-Top display with a customer logo on the wallpaper and a big "Return to Previous Display" transparent button covering the whole thing.

Interesting that on that project, the PV+ 6 displays that I used occasionally corrupt their real-time clock and send Year values from the 37th Century to the PLC. I've never figured it out, but the operators have learned not to look for Buck Rogers.
 

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