Re: [foxboro] Browser Based HMI

Ales, Dirk, and Winston,
        I never cease to be impressed with the technical horsepower
possessed by the folks on this list!!  I know that is just the tip of the
iceberg because I sit next to a technical superman here at work but
unfortunately he doesn't "talk too much" like some of us.

        Ales, your English is great but I had to go look up MinGW,
(Minimalist Gnu for Windows), to understand what you were struggling with.
The clue to your struggles was in the letter "W" for Windows.  If I was as
fluent in a "THIRD" language as you are in English there wouldn't be any
room left in my pea brain for all of this technical stuff.  You are moving
toward the OS independent HMI structure that I have been talking about even
though you are in an all Windows environment.  My hat is off to you and
thank you for your insightful approach.  Is there any possibility of us
viewing, (via the web), a non-proprietary example of some of your PNG
transparent images using Flash as the animator?  
        For those of you like me that didn't know, PNG stands for "Portable
Network Graphic." 
I found the following info at:
http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/definition.php?png
        "This format was designed as an alternative to the GIF format (which
has been plagued by copyright issues). Like GIFs, PNG files are lossless,
meaning they don't lose any detail when they are compressed. They support up
to 48-bit color or 16-bit grayscale and typically compress about 5% to 25%
better than GIF files. However, they do not support animations like GIFs do.
A format similar to PNG, called MNG, is currently under development, and
will support animations."  
        Is the MNG format being used yet Ales?  The small size of .PNG files
appears to be a great selling point.  I routinely capture DM graphics using
Alt/PrtScrn and then paste them into Paint and save them as .GIF files so I
can email them as a graphical depiction of a process condition.  They are
small in size and of excellent quality.

        Dirk, we too use OSI PI for our long term historian.  I have looked
at some of the graphics that our technicians and engineers have built using
process book but I have mostly just used the trends and Pi Excel to evaluate
data.  Our PI system administrator has mentioned that PI has browser based
capability but until you mentioned it I hadn't considered it as a potential
HMI platform.  PI does a good job of integrating process data from a lot of
different sources and our corporate structure allows us to integrate data
from all of our manufacturing sites globally so it does have appeal.  I will
find out if their solution is MS browser specific or not.  My bet is yes.

        Winston, I couldn't believe you were able to resist the temptation
for as long as you did.  You must be really busy!  You are another one of
the quiet technical supermen I talked about above.  Even though Mozilla has
gotten kicked around a bit I see that there are a lot of folks interested
and enthused about it's potential to usurp the mighty empire of Mr. Bill.
SVG, (Scaled Vector Graphics) and PHP, (Hypertext Preprocessor), are also
here to stay and provide additional tools that can be used by creative
geniuses to deliver the Utopia like HMI!  (PHP) is a server-side,
cross-platform, HTML-embedded scripting language used to create dynamic web
pages. PHP is Open Source software.
 Is there a new CAPE product on the horizon that uses an HMI like the one
you talk about?  Let us all know!

        The one thing that I realized  from all of this is that there must
really be a need for a flexible, OS independent, HMI in the process
industries.  Many folks are spending significant time and effort trying to
come up with a solution, and progress is being made!  This does create a
serious problem for DCS vendors because the HMI market is a significant cash
cow for them and I believe that the market is going to develop into a very
competitive "commodity" business much sooner than we can imagine.  If DCS
data can be served in a timely manner and integrated with many other data
sources available on a network in a generic browser, companies such as
Wonderware and Foxboro will be challenged to their very core to provide
value that customers are willing to pay for.  Foxboro does have more than an
HMI and I haven't heard anyone saying that they aren't providing good
controller and I/O options, and that is where, most would say, their
strength lies.
        My 5 year prediction is that DCS vendor HMI's will be much cheaper
and provide more functionality or DCS vendors will no longer be in the HMI
market!  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  Heck, everybody will
forget I ever said it in 5 years anyway.

Tom VandeWater
Control Systems Developer/Analyst
Dow Corning Corporation
Carrollton, KY  USA
 
 
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