The purpose of a design grid is to force symbols to align to a grid line at left, top, right and bottom so they are easy to position and size compared to eachother. This speeds up drawing/design as you use less time sizing and positioning symbols on the screen. The default design grid is 10…
This show a classic label and an associated edit field. Notice that the text “label” and “Text” are not aligned. In my case I force the controls to align to the grid and in this case I get the side effect that these two texts do not align. One solution would be to switch off…
I just copied text from an earlier blog into my mini text editor for demonstration – and this works out very nicely. The capability to edit text is usually a dinosourus in these apps, so I am very happy to see that this one actually works out well and are very functional. I need to…
Many of the HMI controls use actual Windows Controls as base. In the example above I draw a simulated design form as a symbol and use various build-in controls to get the result as real as possible. The challenge is that these controls are designed to be in control – not be controlled by a…
Just to prove my point with borders being to dark I encreased them from 0x32,0x32,0x32 to 0x64 and it makes a big difference as you now actually can see the outline of the control. Keep in mind that these border lines are design help, not actual borders on the real Form. In design mode we…
The HMI Designer part is progressing, but I must admit that it is a large project and I don’t always have time to work on it. Finally started to wrap up the Property Editor and styling up HMI controls that still have light style. The example form above got a bit dark and close to…
ESP8285 is a smaller version of ESP8266 and comes in three different beakout modules – ESP-M1, ESP-M2 and ESP-M3. The attractive part of this is the size of only 12.3 x 15mm. This being a Wifi module with several IO options it is ideal for my old Model Train Control System. This picture is of…
This is a Dev kit from ST that is a complete Motor Controller in ESC format with 3 current sensors, 3 BEMF, 3 discrete Gate Drivers, Hall sensors, temperature sensors and 28V@120A Solution. The MOSFETS are rated at 120A with 480A pulse, but heat dissipation causes them to be limited to max 40A with hard…
BSA is moving on and is getting more advanced on the diagramming side than I actually planned for in this first version, so one option I am considering is to create a free flowcharting tool. I basically only need to wrap up some of the interfaces and add a print/preview option in addition to custom…
This actual screen dump from BSA illustrate both User Control and User Diagrams. The diagram to left is a process diagram very common to a lot of industrial control systems. This diagram is the actual, main user interface in this case. The User Gauge to right is just an illustration made by 3 polygons and…