Visualisation
A ctrl32 project draws its screens twice over, from one set of tags: on the panel's own display, and in a browser. Both are drawn in the same editor, both travel in the same file, and neither is a picture of the other.
| HMIview — the panel screen | the display in the machine's door: touch, colour, redraw cost |
| WEBview — in a browser | the same project on a phone or laptop, served by the panel itself |
| Screens and widgets | the reference: every widget and every property |
The screens are data
This is the idea the whole product rests on. Screens are not compiled into the firmware — they are a file the panel reads.
Changing a screen means uploading a file, not building and flashing firmware. A colour, a label, a whole new page: upload, and the panel shows it. The firmware is untouched, and there is nothing to go wrong in it.
The same file feeds three renderers — the panel, the editor's canvas and the browser — which is why the editor shows you exactly what the glass will show, and why the browser agrees with both.
Which view for whom
The panel is for the person standing at the machine. It is always there, it works when the network does not, and it is the only view during commissioning when nothing else exists yet.
The browser is for everyone else: the operator checking from the other end of the hall, the maintainer at home at three in the morning, the manager who wants a number. No app to install, nothing to configure on the device.
Most machines want both. A project with no browser screens serves the panel's screens to the browser as well, so you get the second view without drawing anything twice.
One rule above the rest
Set a deadband on every analog tag.
Without it, a measurement reports every flicker of its last digit. The panel repaints, the WebSocket floods, a phone's battery drains — and nobody learns anything from a temperature quoted to a hundredth of a degree.
It costs one field in the tag table and it is the single most effective thing you can do for how a machine feels to use. See Tags.