PowerPoint to show customer HMI walk-through?

Is Powerpoint my best option to build something where i can show the customer an interactive walk through of the HMI thats being built out? I know i will have to Photoshop some things if i need to show any sort of screen animations since i wont be live with the machine when building out the screens in FTVS. But i couldn't think of a better way that you could show a customer the look and feel of the HMI without it actually be live on the machine and completed.

It depends on the brand of HMI you're using. Some will let you run an emulation where you can assign values to the tags.

It might be a little work, but you could program a PLC in a small rack that runs a program to respond to the HMI PB's & value entries, and show values and positions moving.

Video Demo

I recently did an HMI walk through video for a customer using Microsoft X-Box record. Purchased a Samson mic for sound recording.

If you do this, prepare a bit of a script to get you started. Like most people, once I'm started and into a topic, I can roll along nicely. Ended up doing three takes; first try I noted verbal patterns I wanted to avoid; second take was better, but I felt needed to be a bit shorter; third take was a keeper.

Keep your intended audience in mind; appropriate level of tech details, etc.

Ended up being about 10 minutes long, 500MB file...

Steve Bailey said:

It depends on the brand of HMI you're using. Some will let you run an emulation where you can assign values to the tags.

Click to expand...

Panelview Plus 7 or Panelview 800 series HMI's would be the two different types i would like to make this happen with.

Aabeck said:

It might be a little work, but you could program a PLC in a small rack that runs a program to respond to the HMI PB's & value entries, and show values and positions moving.

Click to expand...

This is also an option. Most likely not an insane amount of work, but you would loose what im looking for a think. Instead of sending a video of the HMI and how it would work id prefer an interactive, even if its not fully live, solution. Where as the user could hit a screen navigation button and it would go to said screen, etc.

Powerpoint is probably the easiest option. That's probably what I would do. If you have to run something live and you're familiar with Beckhoff's TwinCAT, you could build a mock-up HMI with their visualization and run it live on your laptop. That would be an "easy" option to show something live and working.

Last option that I can think of is build up a mock HMI via a Windows application in Visual Studio and run it on your laptop. Obviously it would require knowledge in Visual Studio and VB/C programming language.

If you can open the View Studio application on a laptop, you may be able to run the application in test mode for a "live" demo. It would require being able to connect your training PC to the actual PLCs (or a test bench duplicate) but that should be the most realistic way to do training with Factory Talk View Studio.