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…
I have a few electronic designs that annoy me simply because I lack time to work on them. The reason is simply to much happening in RL with projects (have to pay the bills) + focus on Software. This one is the worst. It is actually one of my most advanced designs and a very…
One of the tools I need to add for HMI Designer is a bitmap/Image editor. A simple bitmap editor is easy to create just using an array of 32×32 positions and allow the user to set colors to them. One technique could be to allow an image to be drawn in full size and then…
Testing a new UML tool “Modelio”. This is a GPL, open source. Obviously made in and for Java. I quite like parts of the tool, but I admit that I find it a bit slow to work with yet. They have however done some clever thinking around lines in the class diagram. Rather than having…
Not so much to look at yet, but it is progressing. Testing themes here. The general idea is that you draw annotated user dialogs on a scratchpad. Should be very familiar for most GUI developers.
The table below show the basic tools I plan in the HMI Designer. This tool group is just to get us started and cover the basics that need to be in any GUI design. The list is not complete. Once this is covered we will move on to more advanced gauges and UI components. Select…
One of my concerns are visibility of data – variables. And this is one of the areas where we can take advantage of our graphic nature. As we display a diagra we can also show all variables available to that diagram at a simple tree-list at left (or right). We can also present tools to…
The diagram above is a minimum PLD function similar to classic, empty functions. The only challenge here is lack of executable details. This 2nd diagram show one way of presentaing executable details. This is key to our success, so we need to work a bit on this. This last diagram show a possible single-step debugging…
I did a few prototypes to test a graphical programming language a few years back. First one in VC++/MFC and later one in C#/.NET. What I will do next is to write blog entries discussing the syntax and wrap this up as a language specification. I called this “Plain Logic Diagram” (PLD) by accident and…
I tend to stick to a single, simple concept as I design tools regardless if this is Compiler, Assembler, HMI Designer or something else – I create a tool, a separate Repository and separate output generators as illustrated below: This means that the tools (like HMI Designer) will store it’s output in a repository database…