FT ME Button... Impossible?

How would I go about creating a button in FactoryTalk ME with 2 tags and 4 states??

One binary input and one binary output; these tags are independent of each other! Four states (imagine a real button with a light): Up and Off, Down and Off, Up and On, Down and On.

This is a simple task but seems impossible...

I've tried two approaches:
1. Overlay a binary 2 state button on top of an indicator with a visibility animation. Where the buttons were tagged to the input and visibility animation to the output. ---- It only works as long as the animation is not null; I need buttons to be visible when tags are null.

2. Multistate button with 4 states (one for each image) and 4 AND expressions within Indicator connection for all 4 combinations of 2 tags. The "value" connection is addressed to the binary input. It works only if i'm okay clicking through all the states (4) and since it's a binary tag last two clicks don't do anything (if states are 0, 1, 2, 3: sending the value of 2 and 3 won't affect the tag). I need the button to have binary input but multistate output.

I'm coming to a conclusion that what I'm trying to do is simply impossible.
VBA editing isn't available with ME version.
I've started looking into Macro buttons but don't want to waste time if it won't help.

Any ideas? Thoughts?
Regards

I did something like this a few years back at a different company. If I recall correctly, I used a multi-state indicator on top of a pushbutton object.

For the indicator states, I used an expression something like "InputTag + 2*OutputTag". So:
0 = input off, output off
1 = input on, output off
2 = input off, output on
3 = input on, output on

Is this the kind of idea you're looking for?

RonJohn said:

I did something like this a few years back at a different company. If I recall correctly, I used a multi-state indicator on top of a pushbutton object.

For the indicator states, I used an expression something like "InputTag + 2*OutputTag". So:
0 = input off, output off
1 = input on, output off
2 = input off, output on
3 = input on, output on

Is this the kind of idea you're looking for?

Click to expand...

Exactly what I was looking for! I will try this for sure! Did you make the button invisible but clickable? I suppose making the button transparent without any images. So simply but I couldn't think of this, thank you!

Ruskied said:

Did you make the button invisible but clickable? I suppose making the button transparent without any images.

Click to expand...

I believe you want to make it transparent with the size slightly smaller than the multi-state indicator. Making it invisible would likely disable the button.

Just "send to back" the buttons behind the multi-state indicator. I lay things on top of each other on PV's all the time.

Set the button color by one state pair. And the text color by the other state pair.