One of my favorite parts of automating a system is designing the HMI. Laying out an HMI screen to be both informative and visually pleasing to an operator can be fun and challenging. Many times, “leaving well enough alone” is a good phrase to go by to avoid over complicating the design. Animations, colors, alarms, sounds, etc. are all available to help you get the message across quickly and accurately. While pilot devices, like indicator lights and pushbuttons, can provide some of the same functionality, HMIs are much more flexible and provide not only cost savings with wiring and installation but can also keep you well informed with advanced features like email and data logging.
In this series of articles, we try to answer many of the questions pertaining to HMIs in general, with a section focused on how to use C-more HMIs specifically. We hope these posts will help you with designing an actual HMI screen using the tools C-more provides. And if you or your boss is on the fence about whether an HMI would be beneficial in your next project, we’ll help with that too.