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Contents

HMI for Beginners

This is an introduction to our collection of HMI guides. A more complete set of HMI manuals can be found hereADVANCED
This link leads to a manual written for advanced users..

When working with a project based in the Cloud, whether with an on-site Edge server or its Cloud-native alternative, most of your interactions will take place in the HMI.

HMI
One of the two web apps that make up the Cloud; the other one is the PortalADVANCED
This link leads to a manual written for advanced users..

While there are some things you can do in both apps, they generally serve different purposes. Mainly:

  • With HMI, you access and work with a single project.
  • You cannot create new assets within the project, that’s what the Portal is for.
  • However, you can use the assets configured for the project and manipulate them to keep your project healthy.
  • HMI also has tools for retrospective analytics.

HMI Basics

When you first open the HMI, you’ll see the default pageADVANCED
This link leads to a manual written for advanced users. in the page viewer. Let us analyze what we can find in the interface.

HMI main window

Fig. 1. This view greets you when you open the HMI.

— SHOW INTERFACE BREAKDOWN
HMI main window

Let’s dissect what we see here:

Header Toolbar

Contains all the tools relevant to the active view of the HMI. While some tools are available across all views, most of them are specific to each particular view.

Additionally, the header toolbar displays the current global status of the project’s alarms in the right corner, see How Do I Know an Alarm?

Menu

Lists the different views, or sections, of the HMI and allows switching between them:

 Pages
Page viewer, which also integrates tag management tools and history playback.
 Alarms
Shows alarm status and statistics, provides tools for handling the alarms.
 Trends
Highly customizable graphs of current and historical tag values
 Logs
Timestamped history of user activity and system-recorded events.
 Documents
PDF files shared with you by other users of the project.
 Events
Calendar of the project's events.

You can also see two additional items in the menu:

  •  Help links to this documentation (opens in a new tab).
  • shows a pop-up menu with some view parameters and an option to log out.

Navigation

Enumerates the items pertinent to the active view: pages in in Pages, alarms in  Alarms, etc. If those are arranged into folders, this arrangement is preserved. Search is available and may come in handy if the project has many assets.

In some views, navigation provides filtering options and even additional tools for creating and/or editing the associated items, such as events or trends. However, these do not become project assets.

Viewer

This is where most of the activity happens. It’s where you see the contents of a page, the list of active alarms, the log tables, the trend graphs, etc. Depending on the active view, the viewer provides additional tools for navigating the shown content, filtering out what’s not relevant at the moment, or even creating new visuals — like freshly plotted graphs.

Keep reading the guides in this collection to learn more about each section of the HMI and the tools available in them.

Demo setup

The guides about HMI, which you’ll find listed further below, are based on a simple project that represents a laboratory room. The room has a basic climate control system of four components:

  • Cooling circuit:
    • Fan
    • Pump
  • Heating circuit
    • Heater
    • Pump
    • Valve
    • Switch
    • Mode selector

Cooling fan and pump remove heat from the laboratory space, so increasing their output will lower the temperature. On the contrary, the heater and the hot water pump produce heat and add it to the room. Thus, increasing their output will result in a higher temperature.

On the “cold side”, the temperature is affected by the weather outside. It’s a simple linear relationship: colder weather means colder indoor space, and vice-a-versa. Weather data is continually retrieved from public sources for the virtual lab’s location, which is downtown Copenhagen.

On the “hot side”, the temperature can be further fine-tuned by adjusting the valve throughput. Additionally, the heater can be completely disabled when in manual mode.

The project’s single pageADVANCED
This link leads to a manual written for advanced users., Lab Wing, presents us with all the data:

Laboratory room schematic

Fig. 2. Optimal temperature is a must for optimal operation!

Thus, the critical parameter of the room is the temperature, which is a function of six parameters that users can control plus one parameter outside user control. Our task is to keep it within the optimal operating range and to respond quickly to undesirable changes in temperature. While we cannot control the weather, we can still adjust the settings of the climate control system. To that end, the project has the following assets:

Six writableADVANCED
This link leads to a manual written for advanced users. tags:

  1. Cooling Circuit/Cooling Pump
    (numeric) Controls the coolant flow rate in m3/h.
  2. Cooling Circuit/Fan
    (numeric) Controls the speed of the cooling fan in rpm.
  3. Heating Circuit/Heater
    (numeric) Controls the temperature of the heater.
  4. Heating Circuit/HeatPump
    (numeric) Controls the flow of hot water in m3/h.
  5. Heating Circuit/HeatPump_MCMD
    (boolean) Controls whether the heating circuit is running at all.
  6. Thermometers/HeatPump_M*
    (boolean) Controls whether the switch (_MCMD) is locked or not.

Two non-writable tags:

  1. Thermometers/Temperature*
    (numeric) Displays the resulting indoor temperature, in ºC.
  2. Thermometers/Weather
    (numeric) Displays the outdoor temperature at the laboratory’s location, in ºC.

Additional elements:

  1. Heating Circuit/Valve**

    (numeric) Adds a coefficient to the heating system’s throughput. This tag is controlled by an automated three-point regulator (not shown in the figure).
  2. Heat exchanger (untagged).

Thus, the system uses the following object types: fan, pump, heater, heat exchanger, valve, thermometer, and meter. The objects are connected with directional pipelines.

NOTES

 * The manual mode toggle is not a standalone object; instead, it is tied as a click event to the indoor thermometer.

** The object on the page is a valve symbol; however, it manages the regulator that controls said valve; the valve itself is not directly writable from HMI.

And finally, two alarms:

  • Lab too cold!
    Triggers when indoor temperature drops below < 20 ºC.
  • Lab too hot!
    Triggers when indoor temperature rises above > 24 ºC.

Thus, the temperature in the sample storage area must be within $ [20,24] $, in ºC. To that end, we can adjust the parameters of the climate control system or fine-tune the regulator to provide automatic adjustments. Alarms are there to keep us on the toes about temperature.

We’ll use this project and its assets to demonstrate the tools you can find in the HMI for your own project maintenance.

Table of contents

  • Work With Pages - Look at your project like it's a canvas. Write values to tags and replay their history down to minutes. Leave your comments for others to see.
  • Handle Alarms - Learn what to do when you see an alarm and how to investigate alarms retrospectively.
  • Analyze Trends - Plot sophisticated graphs to visualize the relationships between your tags.
  • Extra Tools - for greater opportunities: check logs, schedule jobs on your project, and more.