OT..Sence of humor?

Fun with HMIs

I once placed a small button on a HMI main screen labled SD. The only way to find it was to move the mouse untill the letters SD came visible. Clicking the mouse caused a pop up window to appear and a count down from 10 to start. A panicing opperator phoned the manager and informed him he mistakenly engaged the saftey lockout of his pumping system and he needed someone to reset it. This link only opened the popup window, but no body would listen to me. A week later, a sign appeared in the contol room " operators activating the safety lockout without authorization will be disciplined". I should have had a counter on this but didnt. I quietly removed the link the next day. People are funny sometimes.

The closes I came was placing an autocad drawing on the server named "do not open.dwg" When opend the drawing had some text that said "I said, don't open this drawing. Can't you read?"


It was deleted in a few days. I am positive I know who opended it, too.

Havent done anything with HMI like this but I did machine a base plate one time and had put a 12MM hole in the wrong spot. I just tapped it and put a plug in. Later before shipping the part out I made a tag that said "OIL MONTHLY". About 2 years later I am doing some onsite work at this company and find that sure enough, they were oiling monthly. By this time I had become good friends with the owner and he really got a kick out of it.

Bob

This may be an urban legend, but a buddy of mine swears to the truth of it.

He finished troubleshooting a problem, slapped the side of the main control console, and then told the operator that the trick to getting the machine to run right was knowing exactly where and how hard to hit it.

A couple of months later he was back in the same plant on a different machine. Ha happened to wander by the first machine and to his horror discovered that the side of the console had had slapped was now severely dented. It turned out that every time the operators experienced a problem, before they called maintenance, they tried to find that 'sweet spot' to hit.

Lol

bob1371 said:

Havent done anything with HMI like this but I did machine a base plate one time and had put a 12MM hole in the wrong spot. I just tapped it and put a plug in. Later before shipping the part out I made a tag that said "OIL MONTHLY". About 2 years later I am doing some onsite work at this company and find that sure enough, they were oiling monthly. By this time I had become good friends with the owner and he really got a kick out of it.

Bob

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Then came the bill for two years of monthly oil and maintenace time.. lol, just kidding... that is funny...

davidg68124 said:

I did add to an HMI display a small face that would creep up and peek at you from various parts of the screen every once in a while. I got a few calls on that from the operators because they swore they saw something but it would never come back....

David

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Ok being a novice still on touch screens... I am really curious how one does this, and can it be done on EZ-TOUCH panels?

One time not on purpose, i set up a program, for a canning line. Supervisor asked for a horn to sound when the line started, no big deal. Once up and running, a fellow elecrician said in the navy horn would sound 3 times. I thought hey why not be diffrent, so set it up, started the line worked great but in my hurry forgot to set it only for 3 times so it kept going off and on... so while I was looking for where I screwed up, I looked up and noone was around... come to find out managment thouht it was the fire alarm and evacuated the plant. Needless to say I changed it back to just one short horn blast, and spent short time in managment office

oh well.......

Solitaire

I set up an HMI once with a Solitaire screen capture so that the operator could make it look like all the bosses computers........

pdelno's talk about shifts reminded me of another...

Back in my injection molding days, we built a machine that welded the clear film to video boxes (where the graphic insert goes). We had a lot of competition between shifts, so I added a "High Score" screen (much like a video game) that kept track of the highest producing shift and date achieved...



-Eric

well at least i am not the only one..!!
I walked in the plant early today and saw 3 guys waiting...(I was one of them!~!!!)..when the time hit the guy pushed the button..and there you go...

Realy..the more i think about it i realise...women are right...men are pigs!!!

D

I was using cimplicity on a Windows 2000 machine. I added links to a couple of libraries and used the VBA to perform the task.


In the EZ-Touch, I am not sure what you could do. Maybe import a smiley face bitmap and create an animation object based on time or a counter register somehow. I have never used EZ-Touch, so I do not know.

David

I remember several years ago I added Piranha Club comics (Ernie) picture in PAUSE screen. In the picture Sid, Dr. Port and, as I remeber, Ernie himself ordered beer in the pub. Operators liked it a lot.

Interestingly, there is a moral to this story - I have personally seen operators begin pumping buttons COMPLETELY AT RANDOM when a machine dies on them

Click to expand...

That remindes me one way how my supervisor checked is the machine ready for delivery.


Regards
Lauri

One thing I did with my last machine that got a few laughs-- I was using a PV1000 touchscreen, and on the manual page put in text that was only shown when the (momentary) button was being pressed (ST0 I believe). So the buttons would say Up or Down or In or Out, but when you pressed them, the text would turn to "Ouch!". Actually saw a tech pull his hand away like he had really hurt the thing...

Interestingly, there is a moral to this story - I have personally seen operators begin pumping buttons COMPLETELY AT RANDOM when a machine dies on them. When I design my HMI's (the only thing hard-wired is the e-stops) I always make sure to present, and enable in the program, ONLY those features I want the operator to have access to AT THAT MOMENT.

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Couldn't agree more! After learning the hard way, I've been doing this for over thirty years now, starting with the early semi-graphic screens. All buttons on my HMIs are either of a suitably high priority that they are only visible for me, or trusted maintenance staff, or else only become visible when all the necessary conditions (including interlocks, etc.) are satisfied.

In the 1980s, we developed various bench-top biological tissue-processing equipment; serious lab-stuff. A couple of these had a 2x40 character vac-flourescent display on the front, with four softkeys below the display. There was also a little piezo-speaker on the board. The programmer was nuts about computer games and incorporated (hidden by a very complicated button-pushing sequence)a full-blown space invaders game, complete with sound effects, increasing difficulty levels and a hall of fame! The display also announced the event of his birthday if the unit was switched-on that day. The boss only ever discovered the birthday one, and the programmer was allowed to leave it in, so long as he bought a round of cream cakes for the design office.

Another colleague used to generate full-stops (periods) for the text-box of his autocad drwaings, made up of insults to his boss, and then scaled them down till they looked like any other dot.

Not quite the same, but I've seen a dedication to a deceased engineer incorporated into the copper of a pcb. (A large, international company).