Hardware

Please be reminded that Movicon is a powerful Scada/HMI platform designed for providing project designers just one unique and flexible designing tool for both powerful supervision systems based on Personal Computer (ie. Windows 32/64 bit) and small Touch Screen devices based on Windows CE at the same time.

The later requires the designer to carefully consider the target device's limitations, for which the project should be developed keeping the constraints in function with the panel's capacity in mind.

This document requires the designer to have the basic know-how of Movicon.

Touch Panels based on Windows CE usually vary in features. Therefore the designer should check whether their target device has at least the following requirements:

• Windows CE 5.0 or later

• A minimum CPU of 400 MHz

• A minimum RAM of 32 MB, 64 MB recommended

It is very important that the chosen hardware is suitable for the project you wish to design. Often mistakes are made in choosing Touch Panels for their price rather than their hardware features, which may turn out to be insufficient for project use.

• The project must always be proportioned to the hardware used.  Below are described how to choose the right device or how to adapt your project to the hardware available.

• Even though the Movicon software comes supplied pre-installed by the device builders, it does not mean that Movicon is a generic software and not designed expressly for one specific target.  Therefore the tips mentioned in this documentation should always be taken seriously.

Different WinCE hardware devices supported by Movicon

 CPU type and graphics cards

The processor's calculation capacity is very important, and a good processor builds the foundations of obtaining good performances.  It is important that you get good graphics cards for your panel's graphics. If processed program image outputs are sent to graphics cards not in parity with the processor being used, you may find a noticeable performance drop when refreshing displayed data or in the time it takes to change pages.

Benchmarks Performances

The below table shows the results relating to the number of graphic refreshes a second using a Movicon test project for displaying on screen the value of variables exchanged with the PLC (worst condition).

Considerations

The following performances are normally considered acceptable:

HMI Panel expectancy Times

Page Change 0,5 - 1 sec.

Displayed Data Refresh 0,5 – 1 sec.

Command execution 0,5 – 1 sec.

Movicon will allow the above performance indications to be obtained with ease providing you design your project to match the hardware type it is to run on. Obviously, this shouldn't be a problem in the designing phase when using powerful panels. However if the touch panel does not have the required hardware configurations you will find yourself having to solve problems to satisfy these constraints in order to adapt and optimize your project to the hardware resources provided in its designing phase.

Movicon is a general-purpose software and therefore not tied just to one specific hardware and cannot fully ensure performances under the above mentioned circumstances.