C-More Micro HMI Radio Button Object from AutomationDirect

The Radio Button object is great for those times when you want to limit the user to just 1 of several possibilities. Just like the other switches, this switch only modifies the TAG – it is then up to the PLC to do something about it. Look at how the Radio Button Switch affects the TAG – this radio button is connected to this TAG - it’s a little different than the other switches – the first button changes the TAG to a 1 – that’s ok, the 2nd button changes it to a 2- that’s ok, but the third changes it to a 4? The fourth button to an 8? The 5th button to a 16 … See the pattern? Each button on the switch modifies a single bit in a 16 bit word. That means you are limited to a maximum radio button width of 16 buttons – one for each bit. Let’s do an example to see how to set this up. Double Click or drag the radio button onto the screen. Just pick the number of buttons you want, we’ll use oh .. five here … and specify the TAG that the switch will modify - We’ll use the Conveyor TAG in this example. See the “How To Use Common Object Features” video for all of these formatting options – we’re not going to mess with that here. On this radio button object you can set the on/off text for EACH individual button. Just choose the button to modify right here. We’ll put a 1 in for both the on and the off text … a two here, a three here, a four there and finally a 5 here. In addition to a round vs rectangular style- we’ll use the rectangular - you can also specify the orientation of the switch. The text automatically re-aligns. Again, you can test this button anytime you want by using the simulator. Select the button you want to test … and you can see what the end result is going to look like. Hit OK, re-size the button … place it on the screen where you want it … and hit simulate. Move onto screen, resize, shrink it down a little bit and Simulate. Save the project and up pops the simulator. Just as we saw earlier – these buttons are modifying individual bits in this CONEYOR TAG. I press 1 I get a 1, 5 gives me a 16 What about these function keys on the front bezel of the C-More Micro? Can we use those to control the Radio Buttons? Sure! Lets take a look. Go back to our project … double click on the object. Up here in the right hand corner you can select a function key for each button. So for button 1, we’ll select function key 1 … 2 we’ll select function key 2 … 3 we’ll select function key 3, now notice that function keys 1 and 2 are no longer available … you can only have one function key per button. Let’s go ahead and finish this out – assign 4 to 4, and finally 5 to 5. Press OK, Simulate, save the project … now in addition to our touch screen modifying both the buttons and the TAG … the function keys do also. That’s it for this video – be sure to check out all of 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!