Documentation, Visual Studio, GitHub and more...

[Automatikai]

Hi Archie!

I don't know if you remember me, but I visited you several years ago asking about animating objects in Advanced HMI for a ControlLogix HMI. At that time I had not done much with Advanced HMI, or for that matter Visual Studio.

After doing some research on VS I found many suggestions for code development, including that of committing code to Git so that things can be tracked and reversed. I have also looked through this forum as part of my learning experience.

As many have mentioned here, most questions are solved by looking for help on VS and Visual Basic/.NET, but it opens a huge can of worms for those of us who are very experienced in PLC topics but not app coding and all the associated languages.

As part of my learning journey I have taken many of the help files and comments in your software and put it in a Word document with chapters, headings etc., which I would be happy to share with anyone who wants it. Unfortunately I don't see an easy way to collaborate on such a document, so right now as I find different questions that need to be answered I just write them up and add them to my document.

I am still struggling a lot with some basic things that would be simple if using FactoryTalk View, WinCC or even VISUs in CodeSYS or TwinCAT. Things like screen switching, creating an interface for setting up communications (IP address, slot number, subroutine concatenation with tag addresses, etc.) I am sure this has been done by many people, but despite this being an open platform I have found very few code examples that help answer my questions. Without my work in TwinCAT and CodeSYS I would be completely lost in Visual Studio.

Several regulars on this site have rightly chastised new members for not researching Visual Studio coding more before asking questions, but I fear it is a multi-year exercise to learn the ins and outs of this type of coding, even with my extensive experience in programming PLCs, including ST.

Any pointers you might have in finding more examples of deployed HMI code or better VS training?

[Archie]

AdvancedHMI does lack public documentation because years ago this was done by intention in order to give an advantage for attending the training classes. There was an attempt to create a user driven documentation wiki, but thanks to spammers, that had to be locked down:

https://advancedhmi.com/documentation/index.php/Main_Page

There was also a repository for samples, which is now fairly old:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/advancedhmi/files/advancedhmi/3.5/SampleProjects/

Any suggestions along with offers of help to improve the documentation is always welcome.

[Automatikai]

Thanks Archie! I didn't know about the AdvancedHMI Files folder, I'll have to see if what I am wanting to do is built into any of the Sample Projects.

I am happy to share the document I am creating that encapsulates many of your program comments, just let me know where to put it. It will be a living document, I learn best by documenting what I do.

As far as training, I would imagine that most of the industrial automation focused users of the software have the same problem I do, a lack of experience in Visual Studio. A good VS class would be useful, but probably would take years to become adept in. I teach PLC classes for AB, Siemens, Omron and Beckhoff, and students only pick up the very basics in a week. I always tell them it takes years of practice on real-world applications to become adept at it, and they rarely have the opportunity to write their own code and build equipment like I did coming up. I teach TwinCAT only to people with a firm foundation in ladder from some other platform, and it is MUCH harder to teach things like OOP and ST structures to people with no practical coding background in a non-graphical language. Also for most of them their company pays for the training, companies have much deeper pockets than individuals.

I tried to attach a pdf of the document here, but the max file size is 512k and the pdf is 1.6MB. I am also happy to share the Word format with you or anyone who wants to collaborate on it. Let me know how I might share it.