C-more Micro HMI Static Bitmap from AutomationDirect

The Static bitmap gives you the ability to load any bit map you want, stretch it, shrink it, and change the background color. Let’s go to the static bit map, and drag one right out of the parts list on to the screen. Let’s move the dialog so we can see what we are doing here. You can lock the aspect ratio, stretch the graphic to fit the area you define and the usual formatting options. Now you have a graphic you can put anywhere on the screen and stretch to any size you want. If you load a color image into the B&W version of the panel, the software will automatically convert it to black and white. The options are limited in the 3 inch panel with only black and white, so lets flip this over to a color panel by going to the navigations windows function tab - panel manager. We simply select a 4 inch part number, and hit OK. Do we want to leave all the objects the same size as they were on the three inch panel? Sure. And here is our four inch panel. We can either create a new bitmap or we can just modify the one we have on the screen. Let’s do that by double clicking. We hit the disk button and lets replace that graphic with something a little more colorful. How about a nice big red NO button. This time let’s just double click on the static bitmap object. Hit the DISK button, and now we can load any color graphic we want. Let’s pick something colorful here, how about a big NO sign. Again you can lock the aspect ratio, stretch to fit and you can even set a transparency color. Let’s do that here just so we can see what that looks like …We’re going to set the transparency color – let’s pick this white right in here, and see what happens. Say OK. As you can see, when I move this around the screen – very little of the object transparent. In fact, just this little bit right here and right there. The reason for that is if you look closely at the object, very little of it is actually white. So you need to be careful when you use the transparency option. We’re gonna go back and turn that off. Because we really don’t want it here. Now there is no transparency on this object. Let’s make that bigger so we can see it .. and hit simulate, save the project .. and up pops our four inch color panel with our big NO bitmap on the screen. Let’s go grab one more bitmap, this time we’ll just go grab the static bitmap and drag it onto the screen. Hit the disk button and this time go find a nice color picture of a factory. That one looks good. Note that you can choose the resolution … we’re using the hi-resolution right now, but if you are tight on space and need more memory in your panel, choose the low res version – it will save you a lot of memory in your project. We’ll stick with the hi-res version on this one … Let’s not lock the aspect ratio and let’s not stretch to fit, we’ll turn off transparency and see what happens. Now because the original graphic is so large, and we didn’t stretch it to fit the box, it’s really hard for us to get the whole thing on the screen. If we go back and we lock the aspect ratio and we stretch it to fit the area we define, now we have a factory that stays the same size as the box we define. The aspect ratio is also fixed, no matter how big we make the box, the aspect ratio of the factory stays the same. Note that you can change the order of these images using these tools right here. I can take this image and push it to the back, bring it to the front, and all the usual stuff. This can help create effects by putting static bitmaps over bar graphs for example. Just leave the center of the graphic transparent and place the bar graph behind it like in this example screen here. Here’s a graphic of a container with a bar graph on top of it. Here’s another graphic of a gauge with an analog meter sitting on top of it. If you want to take one of these stock images and edit them, You will find them in your c-more micro software folder under USER GRAPHICS. Feel free to makes copies you can modify however you want but make sure you save them to a new name so you don’t overnight the originals. One final note – make sure your custom bitmaps are pre-sized BEFORE placing them in the library – it’ll save a lot of memory on the panel and you will have more control over the quality of the image if the panel doesn’t have to re-size them. 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!