It is now ca 2 year since I started this blog writing about a Model Train Control System. The system had several newbie issues, but what stalled me was the 40Khz sender I needed for the position system. I never found components with correct size and cost that could do the job. The design itself…
HMI Designer is reaching a state where I can use HMI Designer itself to design some of it’s content. I can do this because the Designer also embed the Browser allowing me to embed XML based HMI specifications. I am not sure I gain anything, but it will be a good test case for the…
This is just an idea, but C++ gauge code is basically a set of layers on top of each other. The idea for user controls is to let the user draw separate drawings – this could be visualized as a text tree, but I consider it as a graphics list/tree. The user can then link…
Using the clock bewel from earlier I want to add a needle (polygon) and a cap as indicated above. I now want to rotate the needle based on an input value. Rotation can be done by doing the math yourselves and drawing graphics. The drawback with this is that you use the CPU, so what…
The circle above is a “Bewel” often used around a classic clock gauge. Drawing this is straight forward as you draw 3 circles on top of eachother as illustrated below. I will create some build in gauges, but I think the most important gauge is the one you create yourselves. So I will leave you…
Getting there. I am actually starting to see the end of initial framework tasks, so we can soon move on to more interesting and visual content. It’s a lot of work to be honest… I am happy with using Qt as base. It allows me to write C++ which is optional for this task due…
The Property Editor is a control that allow a group of “properties” (read data variables) to be edited. Rather than making specialized screens you simply list the variables in a TreeGrid and allow each item to be edited using a specialized editor for the data type. It is a quick way of creating an editor…
Finally starting to look like something…
I still have some work to do on the basic drawing/HMI engine, but will soon be focusing entirely on what I call “furniture” as in pre-made controls we can use. I will create some fancy, build in controls, but the most important one is a “User Control” enabling us to create custom controls. Now-keep in…
Making an Actuator- or Sensor- Control System require a little bit of software. It is many ways of doing this, but I always tend to use a pre-tested design containing of 4 main parts: Communication is always required as we either take instructions or send data/progress to another control unit. This is usually also the…