HMI Project

HMI Project sits beside the automation project and holds the panel. It is edited in the same environment, bound to the same variables, and deployed by the same build.

What is under it

Viewports	the panel’s views. A project starts with one, Desktop, and a view is laid out on its own canvas
Assets	the project’s hmi/assets folder, mirrored: Images for the pictures a screen draws, Machines for the models a 3D view shows

The tree carries the folders; what is inside them is shown as previews on the folder’s own page, which is where a picture can be looked at.

A template lays out every page

Adding a view offers Choose a Template: CNC Wide, CNC Vertical, CNC Compact and Blank, with anything you have saved under My templates. Axes says which axes the screens are laid out for and arrives filled in from the project’s channel.

The template is a starting point. Every page and widget it places can be moved, replaced or deleted afterwards.

A binding names a variable, not a copy of one

A widget binds to a symbol in the project, with a direction, and where the value is ambiguous, a selector saying which one is meant: which channel, which axis, or which entry in the alarm list. What the operator reads is the value the control is acting on.

The screens are built, not read

Building the HMI produces an executable rather than a description the panel loads at start-up. A screen change is a build and a deployment, not a file copied onto the panel.

An access level on a page hides it, it does not protect it

A page carries the lowest access level that may reach it, and the panel shows it to nobody below that. The target refuses the operations behind that page on its own, whatever the panel is showing. So hiding a page spares an operator a screen of controls that would all be refused, and leaving one visible grants nothing.

Where to go next

• Access Levels: what each level may do.
• PLC: the logic behind what the screens show.
• Building & Deploying a Project: getting a build onto a target.