Creating and Editing HMI Screens

Begin in Program View. Highlight the module whose HMI you wish to edit or create. Click the "HMI Edit" tab. The HMI for that module will appear. If no HMI has been created yet, a blank window titled "New Name" will appear. Inside this new window you have a special Right Click menu with the following entries:

Insert (Ctrl Insert)
This function allows you to insert an HMI object. Once Insert is selected, a window will ask you to caption the object and choose from a drop-down list to select the type of object. Once an object is inserted, click to select the object. (The selected object is marked by a yellow border.) Double-clicking an object will bring up its configuration parameters.

Copy (Ctrl C)
This function creates a new object identical to the one selected. A copy of the original object will appear on top of the first. Use "Drag" to position the objects.

Delete (Ctrl Delete)
This function deletes the currently selected HMI object.

Mark (Ctrl M)
This function is required before Move will work. Click to select an object, then select Mark from the right click menu. The object will have a green border indicating it is marked. After a Move the marked object will be on top of the Moved object. In other words, you are moving the selected Move object behind the marked object. This is changing the Z order. Mark and Move have nothing to do with changing the object's X, Y position on the screen.

Move (Ctrl V)
This function allows you to move an object behind the marked object. After a Mark operation on one object, click to select a second object and execute a Move.

Window Properties (Ctrl W)
This function applies to the background HMI window. Selecting Window Properties allows you to set the title to appear at the top of the window and to select the background color. The window size coordinates are displayed and you can explicitly set the window size but you can also set the size after you detach the window with drag and resize.

To use the color wheel, drag the "color selector circle" to the desired position on the color wheel. Use the slider below the color wheel to darken or lighten your color. The "Color ID" displays your selected color as a six digit hex number in HTML color format. This number is useful for setting other objects and windows to the same color after a selection has been made the first time.

Click to check "Limit colors" for optimum performance with 256 color or monochrome displays. Normally the three colors red, green and blue can each take on 1 of 256 different values thus giving 256 X 256 X 256 = 16,777,216 different colors. If "Limit colors" is enabled only 6 different values (00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF) are allowed for red, green and blue. This gives 6 X 6 X 6 = 216 different colors (or shades of gray). Some important numbers are 000000 Black, 0000FF Dark blue, 00FF00 Green, 00FFFF Light blue, FF0000 Red, FF00FF Magenta, FFFF00 Yellow, FFFFFF White.

Capture Object
Often you would like to capture the attributes of an HMI object and then be able to update other objects with these parameters. Click to to select an object. Then select this function to write the selected objects parameters to the template.

Setup Template
Select this function to manually set the parameters in the template. Note also that you can select which parameters are used for update as you "touch" other HMI objects. For instance, if you just want to set the background colors of a group of objects to that of the template, make sure the "Color ID" is correct and that only the "Back Color" selection box is checked. Now each time you select and touch an HMI object the background color is set to this template value.

Touch Object
Once your template is set as described above, click to select an object and then select this function. All the settings of the enable attributes in the template will then be transferred to the selected object.

Note: The following functions are toggles. When enabled there is a check mark next to the item. There are no short cut keys for these functions. You must right click to bring up the function menu and then click the function to toggle between the enabled/disabled states.

Resize
When enabled you may use your mouse (or arrow keys) to resize the selected object. Disabling Resize prevents you from accidentally resizing objects while you perform other operations. If Resize is enabled, Drag is automatically disabled.

Magnetize
This function causes all objects on the selected frame to stick to the frame for Moving, Copying and Deleting. Magnetize makes these three functions operate on the group of objects rather than each individual object. An object's upper left corner must be on top of the frame for magnetize to take affect. Objects underneath the frame are not affected. When copying a frame the new copy will be to the right of the original. Be sure there are no objects that this new copy will overlap with!

Detach
When enabled this function detaches the window from the HMI Edit frame. This is how the Window will look when a user is viewing the screen. You may drag the window to the desired location on your screen and resize as necessary. Disabling causes the window to reattach to the HMI Edit frame. If you move the  window location, when you re-attach or change tabs you will be asked if you want to save this new position.