C-more Micro HMI: Changing Screens with Function Keys from AutomationDirect

There are a several ways to have the function keys effect a screen change. The first is to use the Screen Change pushbutton and specify which function key will take you to which screen. See the video on the Screen Change object for more on that. The second option is to use a Screen Selector Object – that one actually puts a menu of screens up on the screen for the user to select from – again, there’s a whole video on how to use that object, so check out that video for information on him. In this video we are going to use the Function Object. Each function key is assigned to go to a different screen. You can use either the soft keys here by using the touch screen, or you can use the actual function keys. Let’s see how to set that up. In this project we have setup 5 screens each with their own color and a 6th screen we are going to use as the background. We’re going to put the Function object on the background screen and let all the other screens use that screen as a background screen – that way we can setup the function keys in one place and only have to maintain them in one place in the project. Check out the video on setting up background screens to learn how to do that. Double click or drag the Function Key object onto the background screen. When we open that up, we see all TEN of the function keys. For each one we can specify which screen it should jump to. Let’s assign F1 through F5 to change to screens 1 through 5. So we’re going to make this a screen change to screen 1, a screen change to screen 2, screen change to screen 3, a screen change to screen 4 and finally a screen change to screen 5. If everything looks good, then we just hit OK. In order to use this function object on all the other screens, we have to tell them to take advantage of that. So we go to screen 1 and say we want to use a background screen and we want to use this screen 6 as the background screen. Same thing for screen 2, same thing for screen 3 – don’t forget to enable it. Screen 4, and enable it, and finally screen 5. Now on all of these screens you can see the background screen is a little dimmer than the rest of the objects on the then screen to remind you it is a background screen. The beauty of this is all o these screens can take advantage of the one background object. Let’s simulate that and see how it works. So let’s see, F2 should take us to screen 2, F3 to screen 3, F4 to screen 4, and F5 to screen 5. What if you don’t want these labels on the screen? Can we get rid of them? Sure. Go back to the dialog – remember, you can’t edit the object on any screen, you have to go back to the background screen to edit the object. To get rid of those labels, we just turn off show keys. Now when we simulate the project, or bring it up on a real panel, the labels are gone. BUT, the function keys still operate as expected. If you want a real good example of using a navigation menu check out the How To Video Demo of the Bottling Plant for an example of how to do screen changes with a graphical menu on the screen. That’s all there is to using Function Keys for Screen Changes – 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!