Ive played with the image gadget, it has its uses but isnt a good solution for something like this; I have a conveyor with 10 bins on it, I want the bins to change color when they turn on, fairly simple.
Using this method, I have to first find the image I want to use. Groov has a fairly unique design and color palate which makes finding the appropriate image on the internet very time consuming, if not impossible. The Opto svg library was excellent for PAC Display but doesnt fit the Groov design. If I want my images to have aesthetic flow I need to draw them myself, which is also time consuming. Once I have my two bins drawn (both under 2kb svg), I now have 10 image gadgets lined up across the conveyor. However, there is a brief moment when the page loads that an obnoxious white place holder block displays for each image gadget before the images render. All this for a small square to change color when it changes state. On top of that this is for a single component of the HMI, if I wanted to do the same thing for another component, the screen becomes a mess of white place holders when the customer enters that page, if I do this for multiple components across multiple pages, the customer is continually seeing these place holders and it starts to look unprofessional. Its not the end of the world, and doesnt compromise the functionality of the HMI but it is a stark eye sore and it is sometimes the first comment I get when showing the customer the product. Before we got the update with “Add Conditional Format Rule” for text area gadgets, I did what I mentioned above to cause text to appear to change color on state changes. It was quite the process, but now, this feature has saved me a ton of time and the HMI looks cleaner than before, I think adding the same conditional format to the shape gadgets would make the gadget more versatile.
