A few days ago the company held a small seminar to discuss the development trend of industrial HMI. What will the future industrial man-machine interface develop into? There is a lot of people talking about it. Some people talk about databases. Some people say that they are networked. Some people say that they have integrated the display and control. In the end, everyone began to talk about it. With so many functions, is it still a human-machine interface?
A few years ago, the concept of industrial HMI in everyone's mind was just a graphical display and operation terminal connected to a PLC through a serial port. If you use the PLC as a host computer, the HMI is its monitor and keyboard. But now, the human-machine interface projects we are discussing have become more and more different from this concept. For example, the control panel of the paper cutter, in addition to the display and input, as well as the database management, CIP4 bus communication, can further integrate I/O and motion control functions. These functions are done in foreign countries using IPC. Therefore, they are called paper cutting machines. We use the same embedded system as the HMI, but strictly speaking, this is not a human-machine interface. We also have an HMI project for roving machines. It is also done by IPC abroad, using Dephi's software, to achieve a graphical display interface. These aren't difficult to do with our HMI. Difficulty in advanced database management, he asked us to completely change the software architecture to meet customer requirements. There is also a new energy project. As customers require data collection, analysis and processing, and database management, we are prepared to write programs directly on Linux.
So we feel that many time now is not spent on human-machine interface technology, but other extended features. Of course we are following the market, but where will the market run? Will the market need a single human-machine interface in the future? Still asking for more expansion?
A few days ago to chat with friends, everyone said that recently began to use smart phones, iphone, Google mobile phones, more and more people began to use. As a result, the time spent on computers has decreased significantly. Since I bought the iPhone, I have spent half the estimated time on my computer, watching websites, writing microblogs, checking stocks, listening to music, and checking for urgent emails. . . . . . These things are all done on the iphone. Only when you need to type, you can use a computer. The computer almost becomes a typewriter. The iphone replaces many functions of the computer. I never use iphone to call because I already have a Nokia and I don't want to change numbers. Therefore, I am reluctant to call my iphone a smart phone because it is not a mobile phone for me. It is more like a computer with a mobile phone function than a mobile phone with a computer function. Now I think there is a more appropriate name, it is called a smart terminal.
The name of the smart terminal is placed on many of our current human-machine interface projects. It is also very appropriate. I think that the simple human-machine interface will be replaced by smart terminals in the future, just as if a large number of simple phone calls were replaced by smart phones. The ability of embedded CPUs is becoming more and more powerful, and more efficient embedded OSs and GUIs are becoming more and more open. This trend will inevitably make HMIs that only display and operate use shoulder more functions such as data acquisition and analysis. Computing, database management, wired or wireless network transmission, local control output, even demanding motion control, and more. These functions are currently being distributed to different CPUs, different boxes, different product names to complete, but since the display terminal has already occupied a volume that cannot be saved, why not let it do more things, and put those other The “small box†and the cables connecting the boxes are omitted.
For the systems we develop for our customers, the first generation of products is often connected to these “boxes†with cables in the same way as traditional HMI plus PLC plus servos. When I saw the cable inside the control box, I felt bad. Cables not only increase costs but also increase unreliability. Therefore, our second-generation system is dedicated to removing the cable and turning it into a tiny smart terminal with a display. We hope to provide such intelligent terminals in environmental protection gas and water quality analysis, and in industries such as walking machinery, electric buses, medical equipment, and construction machine safety monitoring.
Some people say that the IPC can not realize the integration of display and control soon? Is the terminal we are doing not an embedded industrial control computer? However, I still want to carefully distinguish between the concept of IPC and intelligent terminal, at least in terms of strategic understanding. In my opinion, the biggest difference between the two concepts is the customized design and user experience. IPCs are more like a traditional technology framework to allow customers to be accommodated, while smart terminals are designed exactly to the needs of customers, and therefore pay more attention to the customer experience. I used HP's PDA 5 years ago. It took me a short time to give it. Why? At that time, the PDA tried to meet the requirements of the mobile terminal with the Windows PC architecture, so the user experience was extremely poor and I could not adapt to it. A small stylus pen held in the hand, facing the same icon as a small ant, little attention on the point of bias, and sometimes point and half a day out, so I prefer the PC. Iphone is a new design, new architecture, new OS and GUI, and even a new software acquisition and upgrade model. All designs are designed to create the best customer experience. The future intelligent terminal will definitely be a new architecture design with the user experience as the goal. In the industrial field, such experiences not only include the touch experience, but also include the real-time control of the control, reliability, standards for shockproof and anti-jamming, appearance of professionalism, clarity of display, and convenience of manipulating telescopic exhibitions. Wait. You can't expect users in different industries to accept the same smart devices. You must go deep into the industry to understand what the user experience of the industry is and use your design to meet their needs.
For example, we talked about a human-machine interface with a Fortune 500 company that is a medical instrument. The man-machine interface for medical instruments is suspended. The hanging pipe and the shell of the man-machine interface are wrapped with silicone. The silicone tube of the hanging pipe is also equipped with a control switch. These switches can control the entire machine through the CAN bus. This method is necessary, and doctors have been trained to operate medical instruments in this way. We also have a man-machine interface that supplies NMR instruments. The LCD is designed for magnetic fields and the communication is made of optical fibers. This is a special requirement of the user and must be customized.
I believe that intelligent terminals will gradually replace the single human-machine interface in the future, and human-machine interfaces will become more of a technology than a product. The intelligent terminal is inseparable from the human-machine interface technology. We cannot say that the iphone is a human-machine interface, but we have to say that the human-machine interface technology in the iphone is awesome. I believe that the function of capacitive multi-touch will be adopted sooner or later in the industrial man-machine interface, especially the large-scale man-machine interface used in control rooms and studios. The use of laser pointers to point screens is not so user-friendly. The open GUI is one of the core of human-machine interface technology. Its challenge comes from the ultimate pursuit of display efficiency and efficiency. Why Kinco and eView's HMI can achieve very fast touch response with very small memory, and the self-developed efficient GUI is the core. The configuration software competition was once the main battlefield of HMI, but now this war is drawing to a close, because each configuration software has to do almost the same, the rest is the understanding of the industry, open-ended Technology platform, the integration of multiple functions of intelligent terminals, and rapid response to customers.
The film "Avatar" describes the concept of the Internet of Things incisively and vividly. All animals and plants can communicate with the mind through the Internet. All the souls can be linked together and interact through the tree of the Holy Spirit. In the coming decades, perhaps the biggest change we can see is that more and more places are being populated with sensors and execution units, and a group of sensors and execution units are connected to local smart terminals. The smart terminals are then connected together via a local area network and a wide area network to form the entire Internet of Things. Therefore, these intelligent terminals will become nodes of the Internet of Things, similar to the ganglion of the human nervous system. Some of them need to display and do local control, and some do not need to be displayed, just a "blind terminal." These terminals should be intelligent, and the data of the sensors should be first analyzed and processed in these intelligent terminals, and the results are transmitted through a higher-level data network. Some local controls are also necessarily executed immediately by these smart terminals without the need for the above instructions. At this time, the smart terminal is no longer just a terminal but an intelligent node that constitutes the Internet of Things.
I believe that from man-machine interface, to intelligent terminals, to network intelligence nodes, automation technology will follow the human desire for a better life and promote human progress. In this process, automation technology will continue to develop itself, introduce new and transform a variety of dazzling colors.
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