C-More Micro HMI: Animate Splash Screen from AutomationDirect

Here’s a simple animation of a splash screen – something that happens once, usually at power on, then transitions to the normal project. The PLC increments this TAG – in this case, the “INDEX” TAG - the C-More Micro watches that TAG and displays the corresponding image. We don’t have a PLC here so I setup F1 to increment that TAG for us. I’m going to hold down the F1 button, it walks through the animation, and then the PLC – once it is done incrementing the TAG – would set the SCREEN NUMBER to the screen it wants to start the project on. Let’s see how to set up that splash screen. Step 1 – we create a new screen for the splash screen animation >> Navigation Windows function tab, screen tab new screen. We’ve already done that, so screen 8 is going to be our splash screen animation. Step 2 – we need to tell the C-More Micro to use this as the first screen after power on – Setup Menu >> Panel Manger, start screen – our splash screen is screen 8. Step 3 – Drop a Multistate bitmap on the screen and fill in the animation images. There are several videos showing you how to use a multistate bitmap to create an animation so we are not going to go in to details here. Just note that this multistate bitmap object is using the value of that TAG as an image number to tell it which of these images to display. Since the PLC is simply incrementing that TAG, it'’ going to start at zero and sequence through this list. So if we start at zero and sequence through that list, we can see a little preview of the animation. And you can also see it on the screen Step 4: Setup the C-More Micro to watch the PLC for screen changes: SETUP Menu >> PLC—PANEL >> PLC-To-Panel tab and we tell the C-More Micro to watch this TAG on the PLC for screen number changes. We enable that feature and we are ready to go That’s it – lets go back to the simulator and take one more look … The C-More Micro Powers up on screen 8 – our splash screen. The PLC then increments the index to display the sequence of images. The PLC then changes the Screen Number TAG, the C-More Micro See that and changes to the home screen. That’s all there is to setting up a splash screen for your project. Please beware that these kinds of things are a resource hog and take a lot of time – BUT - if you have some extra time and are feeling creative, this is a fun thing to play with. Be Sure to check out the other videos in this series. And as always, please send us any topics you would like to see covered – or - any other comments for that matter – we appreciate the feedback