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WilliamsBA

FTView SE Client Display Changeover

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Poked around in the knowledgebase first before coming here and didn't see anything, so here it goes. Right now, our facility has 11 clients, 5 of which are quad screens running FTView SE 7.0. All were installed with 19" 1280x1024 monitors. We're in the middle of moving from Siemens to Rockwell PLC's and have decided as a company to use PlantPAX. I really like it so far, but the biggest thing I'm running into is the sheer size of the global objects. This combined with poorly maintained/designed HMI screens over the years is creating an issue for me with Display layout. The two paths I'm going down simultaneously are 1) Complete HMI redesign to something newer than 80's screen designs (High Performance HMI Handbook is getting a shoutout here) and 2) switching out to Widescreen monitors to get some more real estate. Point 2 is where the issue is right now. All Displays in Display Settings have been hard coded to 1280x1024. I hooked up a Widescreen and replaced one monitor on one of the quads and had the operator run with it overnight to see if there were any issues. At first glance, some of the displays were stretched wide, but it was definitely acceptable. The one thing they noticed is that some of the text just doesn't display on the stretched screen. It has a touch animation with it and you can still interact with it as though it were there, but it just doesn't display the text. I duplicated the screen and had one run as "Use Current Size" and set one as 1920x1080. The updated resolution fixed the problem. However, on smaller screens, the text is crunched so skinny it would not work well to use that way. Is there any solution to this to get by in the meantime of resolution change over on graphics? Or am I going to have to just sit down one day and convert all monitors and screen resolutions in one go? I was hoping to only touch the areas as they got updated PAX screens. Thanks for any advice in advance.

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I would start with (2) first; change to widescreen displays. Then work on (1) as time goes on; update the screens per High Performance HMI Handbook. The FTView screen do not scale well. It is best to manually resize them in FTView Studio for the widescreen display. Going from a standard display (4:3 ratio) to a widescreen (16:9 ratio) always has problems for any HMI. Either you stretch out the graphics or you have blank spots on the ends (like your t.v. does for "old" movies and shows).

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