Dragonfly Human Machine Interface Development Platform (DHMI)

	Flexible Navigation Design     User Management     Language Switching     Unit Switching     Control Button Layout Design     Rich Graph Design     Alarm/Event Audit/Report     Historic Data Management/Saving     Report Generaton/Printing     OPC/DDE Support     VBScript/JavaScript/ActiveX Support     SPC Analyses     Real-Time Curve Display/Analyses     Product Cycle Breakdown     VB6/VB.NET/C# Support     Web Services & .NET Remoting Support     Operator Profile     Control Data Uploading/Downloading/Transfer     Image Capture/Saving     Flexible External Interface Support     System Setup Export/Export/Backup/Restore     ODBC Database Support     System Startup Page Design     System Startup/Shutdown Design

Dragonfly Human Machine Interface Platform (DHMI) is a tool which can be applied to develop the industial HMI applications. It is a total open and transparent PC-Based HMI solution, and can run under WinNT, Win2000, XP or Vista OS. Easy-To-Use and User Friendliness are its two main features. This platform can greatly help customers to speed up their HMI developments, obtain high efficience, meanwhile it can take the HMI designers out of tedious design of HMI general features and focus the main businese specific HMI features. DHMI applies "What you get is What you see" approach to design navigation pages, support OPC, DDE and customized data communication protocals. Many common HMI features are built in DHMI. DHMI supports VBScript, JavaScript, ActiveX Control and External DLL projects to allow the customers to seamlessly embed their own business logics and graphic layout design into the HMI system.

DHMI consists of Servers, and HMI; Servers (Data Server, Process Server, Logger Server, SPC server, Alarm/Event Server, Command Server) are used to collect and analyze data from the process controllers via various drivers including DDE Servers, OPC Servers, DAcq (Data Acquisition) drivers. HMI is used to visualize the collected dada, such that, the customers can control and monitor the industrial automation systems and the plant devices.

The primary difference between DHMI and the common HMI Configuration Software is that DHMI has more flexibility, except supporting VBScript and JavaScript, DHMI can directly use advanced programming language, such as ¡°VB¡±, VB.NET and C# to program its navigation page, and seamlessly embed these pages into DHMI framework, such that any function that VB or C# can implement can be implemented in DHMI via its External DLL Interface support. But many common HMI Configuration software can only support VBScript and JavaScript, some at most can support VBA. As we know that VBScript£¬ JavaScript and VBA are not real Advanced Programming Language, many features are very difficult to be implemented using them. Meanwhile DHMI has the configuration feature that supports by the common HMI Configuration Software, i.e., Visual Graphic Configuration Programming.

DHMI is a lean HMI development system. Unlike many common HMI Configuration Software, which include so many graphic features that the customers may only need its 5% features, the rest 95% features are the overheads to these customers, but these 95% features make the system very complex, difficult to use. DHMI just implements these 5% features that customers often use, and open interfaces for customers to implement their own features using VB, ActiveX control, VBScript or JavaScript based their needs. So that DHMI looks like a lean system without much overhead.

DHMI can efficiently integrate the different PLC data structure in different control platforms into an unified data structure framework using its DataServer component, furthermore the customer do need to consider the data source when they design their HMI.

Therefore DHMI is a good combination platform between the common HMI Configuration Software and the advanced programming language. The customers can use it to develop the professional HMI application with their own personality and strong, rich graphics business logics. DHMI is particularly suitable for those who want to design HMI with their own styles and personality but do not want to spend too much time to implement many HMI general common features (like language switching, unit switching, navigation design, framework configuration, graphics display and so on) .

DHMI is the DDE (Dynamical Data Exchange) and OPC (OLE for Process Control) compatible software. Any DDE server and OPC server can be connected locally or remotely to DHMI, and all the process and business data variables located in these DDE servers and OPC servers can be sampled, analyzed and visualized in the DHMI system.

Dragonfly has developed a methodology to allow the customers to develop their own data acquisition drivers and embed them into the DHMI platform. DHMI servers can be used to embed the customized drivers to access the data, alarms and events from the processes and productions.

DHMI is developed from the customer¡¯s perspective and, as such, it is different from many other software packages. It is easy to set up, use and maintain. DHMI is a fast, flexible, intuitive, extensible and user friendly user interface design system. It uses ¡°What you get is what you see¡± graphic approach to configure the application framework, navigation style, and design your user interface pages.

DHMI uses a window application with the simple, easy and configurable navigation style as its intuitive user interface, complemented with powerful display features with a minimum of training required. The user interface is configurable in all aspects so you can be assured that the graphic display can be developed to fit your business. With DHMI, the customers can bring in their own languages and unit categories to the system.

DHMI provides several web services and .Net Remoting components to allow the customer¡¯s web/windows applications to remotely access the data information of servers.

DHMI Introduction

DHMI and Beckhoff TwinCAT

Back To Home