What's your favoite recipe?

Being near the holidays always brings up conversations about the great holiday food that someone made. Eating good food always ranks high on the things I like to do list. Although, I try not to over do it! Whenever I am eating a holiday meal someone always asks if they can get the recipe for whatever it is they are eating.

So, what does this have to do with HMI life?

Well, HMI's are commonly used to enter and manage setup parameters for controllers. When the parameters are lumped together as a block of information, it is referred to as a recipe. It is no wonder that recipe management is included in most HMI's.

Sometimes programming an HMI to do recipe management can be a little cryptic. In EB8000 this is referred to as "Data Transfer". The sticking points are setting up data blocks in retentive memory and then creating a way to designate which block of data to send.

So, I created a Recipe Demo project that demonstrates how to do this.
The Recipe Demo project demonstrates how to use a Data Transfer (Trigger-based) object to move consecutive words to and from a PLC.
1 of 5 blocks of words can be selected. It demonstrates how to use an Index word.
Internal HMI words are used for the demo PLC, but, in actual projects, PLC words are substituted.

Different ways to select the data block (recipe) are shown:

• Select from list
• Select with a Slider Object
• Direct number entry
• Push-button select

The Fast Select feature is used to display a window where a temporary Recipe is stored for fast recall.

Get the Recipe Demo project here.

What HMI projects are you cooking up between the holidays?