that is my 2nd week with OPTO 22 stuff (PAC Control and Display) and SNAP PAC units:) and really I’m fascinated so I’m going to complete learning it till professionalism.
I created this topic to post my questions related to PAC Display -in general it’s very easy to learn- and most of question will be about graphics and drawings !
I have some now:
My main : How anyone can draw this graphics in the following image as I tried a lot but there is no animation or even 3D symbols in the recent Symbols !
and Customers ask to make Monitors Like OPTO22’s one !
This Image contain a lot of new Sliders and Gauges Also 3D Tanks with moving Bottles. also the animated fan !
How all of that can be done ?!
Glad that you are enjoying working with Opto stuff.
The single best way to get your head around how this project is done is to download it, get it working on your system…
And then break it!
In pulling it apart you will see that there are two parts to the magic, the strategy is set up with various counters and toggles.
The display is a bunch of jpgs and other images connected to those counters and variables. By switching the different images ‘visible and invisible’ you can make the magic happen!
Be sure and move things around and double click on them to see their connections to the strategy.
Make notes if you need to at first, single step the strategy to slow things down so you can see how the two parts interact.
Once you see how the demo project is done, get cracking on your own… Start simple, for example, with 2 images from the built in Symbol Factory.
Before long, you will be able to make similar displays.
Can you give me a direct link to this project? -if it open source :)- as the previous link leads me to general page with a lot of files and i couldn’t find it.
The complete project code is included, Control and Display and everything else. The project is really a showcase of standard object animation functions in PACDisplay Configurator, blinking, visibility, color, size etc. that you can do yourself once you see how they are constructed.
Those static backgrounds are pretty impressive image files, created externally by graphics artists and then imported in the project as jpg images. Unless your customer is prepared to pay for this level of professionalism, its not very realistic to expect such artwork quality in a standard project, unless the sales guy got very excited and promised it to the customer all for free! :mad: (In Spain, the expression would be “the sales-guys’ tongue overheated”)
Where the demo does differ from normal projects, it that a lot of the animation is being controlled by the PAC controller. The advanced movement effects are just the showing or hiding of an object placed in various positions across the screen like stop motion cartoon films. It is very time consuming to create this level of animation.
For a simpler effect investigate the use of:
"Horizontal Position" and "Vertical Position" controller driven attributes to move an object
"Rotate" controller driven attributes to turn an object (Like the fan)
"Horizontal Size (Width)" and "Vertical Size (Height)" to make an object appear nearer or further back.
While not exactly candidate for the Oscar for best CGI effects, PACDisplay is much much better than most other graphics based HMI’s on the market, and has the advantage that you don’t have to be a programmer to produce something reasonable. For industrial control applications the “Wow” factor of advanced graphics functions lasts about a day, once everyone has seen it.
Latest levels of PAC Display support the use of animated .gif files as well as normal gif files, although my own experiments with these have not good! Maybe others have had better experiences?
I just feel I’m missing something here … I have to create everything from scratch including (Switches status, Sliders, Knobs value, fan animation and others). is this the right way or I’m missing something?! … I’m just wondering as I used to use other SCADA software from different vendors so I’m trying to figure out how things work here
and just to know I found it pretty to write scripts to make some animation
I send your reply to my boss and his reply was "I just need a SCADA Like their one and let the sales work to the sales-guys"
any way, the way you mentioned is the way I’m working with now with some scripts but it is like you said “It is very time consuming”
