Earlier this year, DMC attended a training course on the new TwinCAT HMI at Beckhoff’s U.S. headquarters in Savage, MN. We were impressed by the flexibility and convenience offered by the platform and have already enjoyed using it on projects. Due to its unique developer-friendly design, DMC has been able to reduce development time and save money for our clients. Here’s a couple of the features of Beckhoff’s new HMI that set it apart:
Web-based Control and Monitoring
The most appealing aspect of Beckhoff’s platform is that it leverages the internet to allow end users to control and monitor their PLCs from anywhere. Interfacing with industrial controllers via the internet is a common request for DMC, and the TwinCAT HMI makes this easier than ever before with integrated server- and client-side development connecting easily to the underlying PLC access. The key benefit is that a web-based HMI can be accessed from any number of different clients – a traditional monitor screen nearby the device being controlled, a tablet carried around the area by a supervisor, or even a mobile phone halfway around the world. The HMI includes a responsive grid designed to facilitate development for multiple device sizes.
WYSIWYG Web Page Design
As any web developer can tell you, managing the location and arrangement of content on the page can be one of the most time-consuming aspects to do manually. Development for TwinCAT gets around these issues using a What You See Is What You Get style editor, paired with other features to make life easy for developers. Selecting and arranging components is as simple as dragging them in from a menu. The HMI features dozens of prebuilt components, including commonly used displays and controls, as well as advanced charts. We walked through a demo project using several different charts, which update live when linked with the PLC data, making it very easy to display live system data of all sorts to your end users.
Development in Visual Studio
This is a good point to bring up the ease of development afforded by the IDE. Development for the HMI is integrated directly into Visual Studio, which is very familiar to DMC from our extensive .NET development. The Visual Studio pane and menu system’s familiarity makes navigation quick, and Beckhoff’s custom screens are also very easy to use. Integrating development into a widely used and well-regarded editor allows engineers to develop a simple web-based HMIs for their PLCs without requiring extensive knowledge of web technologies. However, developers familiar with web technologies (like DMC) still have access to the generated results, allowing us to tailor a solution to the exact needs of our clients.
Easy Extension and Customization
As mentioned, Beckhoff’s existing framework controls allow for rapid development, especially for simple applications. However, the HMI is also very extensible, allowing for flexible and very custom solutions. DMC took an additional course in designing extensions for custom applications. The extensibility allows for custom Javascript interactive controls, in the case that the provided components don’t quite fit the bill. Further, the HMI allows for custom server controls in C#, which allows us to develop connect to any system, use any library, or employ any custom code from our .NET expertise. The flexibility of these extensions, combined with the ease of creating a simple solution, makes us very excited to work on projects with this new HMI.
Thanks to Zachary Daulton and co. at Beckhoff for hosting us and giving us a preview of the software!