Re: [foxboro] Browser Based HMI

Greetings, Tom!

tom.vandewater@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>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 
>
Thank you, thank you!

>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.  
>
Come on, there is always room for improvement! We all have some hobbies, 
it  looks like foreign languages are mine.

>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.  
>
You're welcome!

>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?  
>  
>
Sure, I'll set up a demo server over the coming weekend and hook it up 
to our I/A station at work.

>       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?  
>
I  don't know if it is being used already, at least I haven't tried it 
yet. My output is layered as follows:
1. background - give it a color of your choice
2. transparent PNG with my copy of FoxView screen
3. any flash animations, which replace original animations from FoxView
4. compound:block.point layer
These are all HTML <div>'s with z-index set-up. As with all other 
images, browser keeps a cache of the requested data and doesn't transfer 
the PNG if not needed. You gain a lot of speed by this behaviour.

>The small size of .PNG files
>appears to be a great selling point.  
>
It sure is. I found it also fairly simple to print-screen the existing 
views to Photoshop or similar software, choose Color Select and get rid 
of background in no time.

>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.
>
>  
>
I couldn't agree with you more.

>Tom VandeWater
>Control Systems Developer/Analyst
>Dow Corning Corporation
>Carrollton, KY  USA
> 
> 
>  
>
BR,
Ales.
 
 
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