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Altered Interfaces Take on Wider Role in Automation

Posted May 03, 2015 12:00 AM by Engineering360 eNewsletter

Industrial HMIs are changing. Text and semi-graphical panels are disappearing, being displaced by wider screens with touch and multi-touch displays. The latter is among today's hottest trends, borrowing technology from consumer devices and helping ensure that change will remain fast-paced in industrial systems for the next several years. That's what ARC Advisory Group projects in a recent study, which also forecasts that the focus on data collection and connectivity will intensify. That means that HMI panels will link the plant floor with the central office, but also act as the means to control modular systems without requiring input from a central control room.

Editor's Note: This news brief was brought to you by the Motion Control Components eNewsletter. Subscribe today to have content like this delivered to your inbox.

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jhhassociates
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Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: North West England
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#1

Re: Altered Interfaces Take on Wider Role in Automation

05/04/2015 5:36 AM

The ARC Advisory Group is commercial company with a vested interest in pushing new technology. This is advertising dressed up as editorial and has no place on this forum. The technology they are trying to promote is at present not sufficiently robust to cope with anything above light industry. Obviously nobody from this company has ever tried to operate a touch screen wearing protective gloves. Nobody has used a touch screen in a dusty or gritty atmosphere where the touch screen surface quickly becomes scratched and unreadable, especially in those areas where soft numerical keypads and enter buttons are displayed. They are advocating "fast moving" technology in a market where "tried and tested" is dominant, where "new" takes second place to "reliable". Industrial plant is typically constructed with a 10-20 working life. Fast moving technology carries with it short life products and obsolescence. Would you incorporate a component in your new plant that will be unmaintainable in five years? This company does not understand it's own market. This is not only advertising, it is bad advertising.
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Kilowatt0
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Re: Altered Interfaces Take on Wider Role in Automation

05/04/2015 2:46 PM

They are advocating "fast moving" technology in a market where "tried and tested" is dominant, where "new" takes second place to "reliable".

Amen! Those have been my go to, for 40 years now.

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MikeMack747
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#2

Re: Altered Interfaces Take on Wider Role in Automation

05/04/2015 10:23 AM

I've designed many HMI's and I've used touchscreens on a few.

I've always had the keyboard in place as an alternate method of data entry, and I find most users prefer the keyboard. The touchscreen goes almost entirely unused.

I've recently used a Windows 8 laptop without a touchscreen and find the HMI frustrating, confusing, and nearly useless. I was able to recover the PC after it was used as an equally useless frisbee, (too heavy for the small surface area presented for flight) Formatting the hard drive and installing Windows 7 with a standard keyboard geared interface fixes the root cause issue of a touchscreen based software platform on a non-touchscreen system.

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