How to Build a Free HMI for AB

No prob - let me know when you start getting specific questions.

nettogrisen said:
surferb

Thanks alot for the info and links,this aught to get me on the right track :)
 
nettogrisen said:
Well yeah :)
I have already been fiddeling with connecting to an SQL server wich gives me some nice abilities, but I'm a newbe with Visual Basic, so at the moment I'm only able to read from the server and not write. Maybe Archie can make a movie about it :)

I'll have to try to see if I can do a 10 minute or less video on logging PLC data to a database. With Visual Basic there are quite a few steps, mostly point and click. Simple table read & writes can be done without the need to write any SQL statements, the VB environment will do it for you.
 
Cool! Would it be similar enough to use MySQL instead of SQL Server?

Archie said:
I'll have to try to see if I can do a 10 minute or less video on logging PLC data to a database. With Visual Basic there are quite a few steps, mostly point and click. Simple table read & writes can be done without the need to write any SQL statements, the VB environment will do it for you.
 
how did you make the video?

Archie,
What software did you use to make those videos? What format/settings did you use. I've used Demo Charge many times, but without an audio overlay. I was surprised at how quickly you modified the video. My coworker made a very professional one with Camtasia but synching the audio, including lots of retakes, ended up taking him several days to make a 40 minute video.

Do you have any tips/suggestions on how to bang these out quickly?
 
Nathan

For those videos I used Easy Screen Capture Video to get the video track and simply used the Windows Sound Recorder to make the audio track. I then used Sony Vegas 8 to put the audio and video together and add the transitions & titles.

That last edit was rather easy because I simply took the final video frame of code, time stretched it, and then zoomed it to different portions of the image.

I've started experimenting with AviScreen for screen capture because it is freeware and so far seems to do the same thing as Easy Screen Capture Video.

Sony Vegas Pro will let you record audio directly, but so far I've only been able to get it to add to an existing audio track and not record from scratch.
 
Archie,
What kind of codec did you select for the video compression. Did it require a big hard drive, a fast CPU, or a lot of time to process?
 
Nathan

When I render them for YouTube, I create a Windows Media Video (WMV) with a bit rate of 1M, frame size 320x240, and 30 frames per second. The file for the free HMI is 15Meg in size. Since YouTube always converts it to Flash video at a frame size of 320x240, rendering it at any higher quality will actually make it turn out worse after converted by YouTube.

When you compress a screen capture down to that size, there is no way to make it really clear. When making videos for YouTube, I now zoom into anything that needs to be read clearly.

For non-YouTube, I find if it is rendered at 1280x720 (HD 720P), it makes a very sharp video, but the file size increases by a factor of about 6 (about 100M).

The rendering process is very compute intensive. It takes over 2 hours to render about ten minutes of screen capture video on a 1.86Ghz processor.
 
How would you recommend to record it if I intend on keeping a high quality copy, but also want to post it to youtube? Hard drive space isn't much of an issue. I have a fast CPU, but it sounds like it'll still be a timesink. Need one of these...(Intel's latest Roswell recall).

What's the "raw" format that the video gets recorded to? Digital video camera vendors each have their own, but Windows? .avi? Software dependent? I take it that I'll probably be separately encoding that to 320x240 WMV, then MPEG 4/whatever else for a high quality copy.

What do you do to zoom while recording? Have you tried fixing a 640x480 recording window to downsize to Youtube quality? I speculate that would suffer from artifacting the least of any the "non-native" resolutions.
 
When I do screen captures, I set it to capture the full screen. The resolution will then be whatever the computer resolution is at the time of capture. I'm currenty using Camstudio for screen record with it set to AVI file format. I find these files to consume about 25M per minute at 1280x1024. This takes a decent processor too. If the PC is not fast enough, your mouse will get erratic during the capture process.

When using a video camera, I create videos at full HD (1920x1080).

After getting all of my video, I use Sony vegas to pull them together. This is where I do the zooming. I find it gives a much smoother and flexible zooming as opposed to trying to zoom during the record process.

I then use Vegas to create, referred to as rendering, the various qualities of video. I have 3 formats that I generally use. One for YouTube, a setting for 720P high res, and another for burning to DVD (Mpeg2). Since Vegas only uses references to the original sources, none of your original video files are altered allowing you to create any format at any time.

I would really like to see how it looks using Blu-ray Disc. Sony Vegas will let you burn directly to them.
 
I'll have to play with zooming. I think I have a copy of Camtasia studios, but not Vega.

It looks like Blu-ray supports MPEG 4 (H.264) and a WMV codec (SMPTE VC-1). Either compression will probably grind your PC for some time :(.

In the TV/Home entertainment world, they (currently) usually use the term "full HD" to mean 1080p. Does your camera actually support that?

Archie said:
I would really like to see how it looks using Blu-ray Disc. Sony Vegas will let you burn directly to them.
 
The camera I have is the Panasonic HDC-SD5, which I think is 1080i, not 1080p.

You can download a 30 day demo of Vegas at
www.sonycreativesoftware.com

If you had a couple hours to play around with it, it's defintely worth it. Of the ones I worked with, the only software that I liked better was Adobe Premiere Pro. Since my camera records in AVCHD and Adobe did not support the format, I went with my second choice of Sony Vegas Pro.
 
Free DF1 driver

For those interested in a free DF1 driver, you can download one here:
http://www.tomantron.com

I will be shutting down this web site sometimes next year as I am involved in other business ventures, so do it ASAP.

This driver provides full implementation of data link layer of DF1 protocol, NAKs ACKs ENQs and timeouts are implemented. The drawback is that it is not compatible with all AB PLCs. I will be willing to give the source code to an interested and serious party that would like to develop it further, i.e. implement floating point and provide addressing for all AB PLC's. This would have to be a non-commercial user, under no circumstances am I going to let anyone make money of it! Also I would expect the party to make the improved version available for free for everyone!
Anybody?????
 
I've already started my own little such project. V1.0 is available already on Sourceforge, I'm almost done with v1.1 which has support for floating point, strings, timers, counters, control, etc. I've written code for PLC logical addressing methods and am currently testing it.

Thanks for the offer. I'd like to take it up, however I'm not sure if your software license would allow inclusion into my project, which is GPL. As far as making $$ of it, GPL does allow folks to sell it, as long as they in turn make the source code freely available.
 

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