Make way for Movicon 11. What’s new for users?

 

Movicon 11, the new Scada/HMI platform based on tried, tested and very innovative Movicon X technology, is soon to be released.  The already powerful built-in functionalities of the previous platform have once again been enhanced even further to create a new improved platform version called Movicon 11.  Movicon 11 has reached the highest technological levels that no other product of its type can match in the Scada/HMI software sector for openness and flexibility at a very affordable price.  Progea now offers an even more simple and powerful product, proving once again that innovation in supervision software is Progea’s main name.  Movicon 11 is a reference point to all competitor products, a real and complete integrated development environment for every need.     

The integrated software technology is completely transparent and based on XML, where projects can be managed with the Movicon platform and any other tool capable of creating XML text structured projects.

 

SoftLogic IEC1131

Movicon 11 integrates a PLC development environment conforming to the IEC1131-5 standard. The German KW-Software Partnership, one of the leaders in the SoftPLC sector, has enabled Multiprog platform integration in the Movicon platform rendering the Progea product a complete environment for both supervision and RealTime I/O control. 

Many advantages can be had in having an all-in-one environment capable of developing and creating both in HMI and control, along with an extra plus of sharing Tags in one unique system. 

Projects are run synchronized mode but executed separately in two of the Windows’ layers (user Mode for supervision and Kernel Mode for PLC).

The Movicon development environment is enriched with an IEC1131 PLC development environment.  The PLC runtime, defined as ProConOs, is executed in a realtime kernel just like a normal PLC and is available both for WinXP and WinCE.

 

 

 

Better engineering with the Refactoring Explorer

Movicon 11 has taken on a new powerful tool that allows developers to save time and drastically reduce the chance of any errors being made.  The Refactoring explorer ensures congruity control of tags declared in projects alerting the developer immediately of any errors deriving from any of the objects associated to non-existing tags.

For instance, all linked objects automatically update when renaming tags in the DB but if a non-existent tag is assigned by mistake, the Refactoring explorer will immediately issue an alert indicating where to locate the error.

The Refactoring Explorer also controls screen strings and names and is without a doubt a tool that no developer can do without.

 

 

 

Immediate vision using the new XML Code Explorer as well

The platform’s XML structure is even more transparent in Movicon 11 where a new service window, called the XML Code Explorer, has been added and through which any project object or resource can be made visible in its XML text structure.  This enables the expert developer to display and modify properties using XML text, being very useful in complex objects where the “Find and Replace” and “Copy&Paste” commands can be used to make work easier.   

 

 

 

 

New Cross Reference helps reduce errors further

The Movicon 11 Cross Reference resource has undergone a complete change to supply the developer more interactive, detailed and immediate information.  The new Cross Reference is completely integrated and interactive, and supplies users with a complete list of all the tags used in the project, indicating which and how objects, functions or logic are used in each individual tag in the project.  A double-click on the list will automatically open the resource and select the object.

In addition to this, the cross Reference permits users to sort or filter lists, change Tag properties directly, or print data for project documentation.

 

 

 

Easier to navigate through pages with the new Screen Navigation Editor

A new resource called the Screen Navigation Editor consents users to automatically create buttons for navigating through project screens.  This visual editor can be used to insert and link screens using a normal connector thread to create the page navigation layout. 

Movicon creates all the navigation buttons on each screen automatically, managing change pages with the relating return management and main menu.

The change page management has also been enhanced with new functions, which include the “next” and “back” page buttons with incremental ID numbers.. 

In addition to this, screen name changes are automatically managed by the Refactoring explorer by updating the call page buttons in the project.

  

 

 

 

 

New integrated Report Editor

Movicon 11 totally integrates a new powerful report generator based on the .Net technology.  The new Report Generator stands side-by-side the Crystal Report’s Report Engine manager, which is still available for use for all those who wish to exploit the potentialities of this powerful and popular report generator tool externally.

The new Report Generator joins together with its predecessor to give the not-so-expert user a chance to use a native and integrated tool capable of producing more sophisticated reports while still using the original native visual object editor.   

The New Report Generator has many types of analysis and statistic functions, filters and queries, formulae and graphics, which together form one of the most powerful tools of its range. 

 

 

 

New Trend Data Analysis Graphics

Movicon 11 provides users with a new and powerful Trend curve generator equipped with numerous sophisticated graphical analysis functions on historical data recorded by associated Data Loggers.  The Trend Data Analysis allows users to execute analysis exclusively on historical data, making it one of the most powerful graphical analyzers available of its range. 

Compared to the more regular Trend uses, new functions have been added to cater for the different destination uses the Data Analysis has compared to the regular Trend uses: trends actually stay linked with duo functionality “Runtime data displays and Historical Log displays”  (run-pause), while the Data analysis only carries out analysis on historically logged data allowing the user more flexibility in being able to use more advanced analysis functions than they had before.

Among the many added features the user will find automatic curve displays in time periods (hour, day, week, month, year), comparisons and analysis on different curves and values, a “tape measure” tool to measure and select areas of the curve to display to the selected data in the trend area, and much more.

 

 

 

 

Improved Trends Management

A new library has been added to the toolbox’s object classes, where the user will find a range of inserted and preconfigured trend objects and ready-to-use in any type of automation application.  These objects are intended to make the user’s job much easier, the hardest part already seen to, the user need only select the type desired.  The Trend objects have been enhanced to extend their functionality and precision in representing data graphics. 

 

 

 

New “Dundas Gauges” graphics object class

Astounding graphical effects can be found in the new viewer object library (meters, gauges, displays) in Movicon 11.  The user can easily create screens with unbeatable styles by using the extremely captivating graphical features offered by these new objects which are completely customizable using the userfriendly guide tools provided.  The Movicon 11 screen look and feel is innovative and modern allowing the to add their own magical touch with the help of the special effects featured in the new integrated Dundas Gauges tools. 

 

 

 

 

Improved meter and slider styles with greater button style openness

Also the regular Movicon objects, such as meters, sliders and cursors, have undergone beauty treatment to improve their styles with new graphics for control knobs to give that final overall look extra appeal.  Users can also get an even better chance to customize button styles in the Movicon objects libraries.   In addition to the proposed styles, the user can now associate external images referring to the three statuses of the buttons or selectors (press down, release and while down).

Without a doubt, Movicon is the Scada/HMI platform with the most powerful and captivating graphics with a supremacy that even competitors find it very hard to deny.  The famous ‘Italian style’ now at its best in the most advanced technology of modern automation, where the graphical effects play just as important part in plant system management as the rest. 

 

 

New Scheduler Objects

The Movicon 11 Scheduler objects have been completely renewed and enhanced, while kept compatible with their predecessors.  The new schedulers have extended their functionality and configurability prospects and allow users to add or remove their runtimes and edit times with minute resolutions (only quarter hourly allowed before), change runtime set-points of associated tags, assign set tags also with different tags for each time period assigned to the scheduler.  All remain compatible with their previous versions including the same support to various platforms such as WinCE, WebClient and networking.

Graphically speaking, the new schedulers have three types of styles: 1) Time table only, 2) Grid only, 3) Both timetable modes (as before) allow users to edit times to be scheduled on weekly timetables graphically. 

The grid mode is the “advanced mode” for allowing users to edit times, interval thresholds and the tags desired, freely on a DB grid.  The user can eventually opt to pass over from one mode to another, checking their set configurations in two different display types. 

Users can also edit, add or remove schedulers, associated to graphic objects, during runtime.
The new scheduler objects are even more flexible than ever before and fully meet every application need considering that holidays, additional customizing, permitted by the new properties, methods and events can all be managed using VBA as well. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New ‘Pipe’ graphic object

A new graphic object representing a Pipe has been added to help users automatically create screen graphics with piping.  This new object is made up of a preset poli-line which looks just like a long piece of piping which can be easily manipulated to create the piping graphics desired.  This new object greatly reduces user time in creating pages containing piping with better realistic effects in both graphics and style.

 

 

 

 

New ‘IP Camera’ graphic object

Movicon 11 presents a new graphic object designed to represent images deriving from video cameras through Ethernet/IP network (IP Camera).  This graphic object has been purposely added to meet the increasing demand and use of the IP camera and is also available for WinCE and WebClient.  It is capable of representing images of the most popular and used IP Cameras found on the market.

This new object greatly simplifies showing IP video camera images and has an even greater advantage of being supported by low-end systems based on WinCE and Web systems.

 

 

 

 

New ‘Transparent’ graphic function

A new graphic property has been added to the objects to ensure their transparency on screen.  This new object transparency function can be set as static or dynamic, allowing tag values to determine the dynamic transparency of the objects they are assigned to.  This new function enriches Movicon’s graphic potentialities even further, by contributing to its graphical interface creativity improvement. 

 

 

Enhanced management and data displays in the Tag DB.

The Tag RTDB is the heart of the project, the place where dynamic information, known as variables or Tags, are declared and allocated.  This resource has been improved and enhanced in Movicon 11 to now allow data table representations with better modes for identifying, selecting and filtering data.  A great deal of work has been done to increase particularly big RTDB opening performances, based on the fact that is usually takes a few seconds to open a database containing at least 100,000 tags. 

 

 

 

 

New Expression Generator Tool for objects.

Another new novelty can be found in Movicon 11 which further increases the potentiality of the function used for assigning tags to objects: The Expression Generator.  Users can now associate the resulting value of a VBA expression as the assigned value to show in objects using the Expression Generator, the most convenient way to construct arithmetic expressions with VBA syntaxes in determining a dynamic value whose result will be the one associated to the object desired.  This new tool makes the previously supported features much easier to handle.  It is extremely easy to use that even the not-so-expert user of VBA macros can use it directly in the object’s associated Tag using a simple editor to generate VBA expressions for the object by selecting the most used calculation functions.

 

 

 

Property configuring simplified

New concepts to group all object properties together make accessing and configuring in projects easier.  In Movicon 11, only the essential object properties show immediately.  The more expert user can access the advanced properties through the ‘Advanced’ sub-groups.

This means configuration is simpler with less time spent developing for the user.

To reduce developing times even more, each graphic object in Movicon 11 has a “pre-configuration” file to allow users to assign each object a “default” property configuration doing away with those tedious and repetitive operations of the bygone days. 

Another important and very handy tool helps users get quick access to object properties window.  A transparent “smart-window” will now pop-up when clicking on the object’s border to enable the user to quickly set the object’s main properties. 

 

 

Greater event and command flexibility

Movicon 11 now provides users with a new and powerful functionality that permits them to use Event objects as flexible and powerful tools for organizing project commands and functions.

Users can now define command and function lists, and then recall them not only on tag associated events, but also with any other project command object (buttons, menus, accelerators). In this way commands can be made independent from objects, by centralizing and parameterizing their functions to improve project flexibility.  The Event objects take on a new central position in Movicon 11 for executing commands, to improve project functionality and reduce project developing and maintenance times.

 

 

 

Alarm management potentiality even greater

Movicon 11 has had its alarm management enhanced where users will now find a new and powerful statistics functionality in the active alarms window to allow them view detailed statistical information relating to the number and event type occurred for each specific alarm.  The Active Alarms window is now a complete and competent source of information on active alarm history.   In addition to this and in order to save time, the alarms no longer need to have Tags associated to them.  Movicon will now do this job automatically by searching in the Tag DB for tags with the same name of alarms that have remained without one.

 

 

 

New ‘Speech Recognition’ functions

Movicon 11 has an interesting novelty for its users in the Scada/HMI environment:  The ‘Speech Recognition’.  This new technology consents users to assign vocal commands for activating command or event executions.  Vocal command usage, wherever used, will simplify user access to commands even further.

The Speech Recognition functions can be set in Accelerator objects, for instance, both vocal command and keyboard command can be set with the same identifier string to acknowledge the same command. 

  

 

 

 

Greater productivity in string and font usages

The string management has also been given a spring-clean and is now even more powerful in Movicon 11.  Less chance of errors being made and less time can now be spent in inserting new strings into the project’s String Table resource by inserting them directly from the graphic objects’ properties.

Plus a new control function allows users to check for any missing strings in the project by entering them in directly.  The user is also assisted in handling texts especially when projects are Multi-Lingual.

Users can now associate a different Style and Font to each language used in the project.

 

 

 

Greater customizing using Styles

Movicon 11 has added the possibility to customize project styles and fonts automatically in function with the sophisticated graphics Styles management, which can be associated to the project’s language, User and User Group names or just small particulars and specific screens.

By using these different styles the graphical settings (colours, fonts, themes) can then be replaced dynamically to adapt standard projects automatically to the specific graphical effects required in runtime. 

 

 

Multiple Project Planning, Traceability and Safety

Movicon 11 has foreseen the indispensable need to make development teams work more efficiently and in harmony with each other to increase productivity output.  This requires being able to guarantee that multiple projects are consistent, distributed planning is even and transparent and that all modifications are completely traceable to their origin and originator.  This can easily be done with a new tool called the Microsoft Visual Source Safe, which is completely integrated and provided for full use in Movicon 11.  This tool has been purposely designed for managing development teamwork and traceability in the most transparent way and integrated internal the supervisor system.   

 

 

Greater project documentability

In Movicon 11, the project print and documentation management have been enhanced and now consents both document printing and raster printing of screens (hard copy).

The new documentation tools (ie. Cross Reference and Tag DB) also allow users to print and document resource usages within the project better.

 

Developing time reductions with new project Wizards and Template library categories

Creating new projects in Movicon 11 has never been so easy.  Users can now get to use a new autocreate Wizard manager.  With just a few simple mouse clicks, this new tool makes it easier and more fun to create project structures.  Quicker and simple access to Template library categories can also be obtained by customizing the object toolbar to include the ones that fit your requirements best.

 

Greater system information availability

Information on the Movicon 11 system tags has been drastically expanded to permit users smoother and profitable runtime access to precious data such as available RAM, disk space, active web connections, current paths, and much more. 

 

Greater command functionality in graphics

To enhance the command functionality further in Movicon 11, all the graphic objects have been given a new execution property to activate commands and functions with a mouse click. 

This also simplifies the possibility to activate commands in simple vector graphic objects, without resorting to the click event using VBA scripts. 

Any graphic element can now become a command executor with just a simple click of the mouse or touch on the touch screen. 

 

New statistical information on Tags

New ways of representing and logging tag value statistics have been included in Movicon 11 consenting to a smoother and automatic value management on total functioning times (handy in helping to keep to scheduled maintenances), average totals, minimum and maximum peak values. 

These automatic statistic functions make it possible to display or record not only the current values for tags but also those statistical.

 

 

 

 

More tools make work easier and fun

Working with Movicon 11 has become more enjoyable, thanks the many small touches incorporated to improve everyday use.   For instance, a graphics tooltip has been added to screens so they can be previewed in a pop-up without being opened.  The color palette has also been improved, to offer three selection types: by gradient, by name or by system colour.  The colour management has also been improved for embedded WinCE system programmers, who now can set their projects to manage colour resolutions of connected devices (ie. Grid gradients, 16 colours….).  

 

 

 

Greater functionality in systems with Windows CE

As clearly seen, Movicon offers an all-in-one development environment to create any type of supervision project, from simple HMIs for operator panels to big powerful SCADA systems with distributed and redundant architectures.

New functions have been added to provide the best comfort possible to designers working with HMI systems based on Windows CE.

New functionalities have been added to Movicon 11 to increase performances in devices with ‘low-end’ CPU such as the font raster management, integrated support to compressed BMP images (GIF or JPG) and task and process optimization.  New controls have been inserted into functions not supported by WinCE in the project download or template insertion phase, and new default ‘restriction’ functions can be found and support is now given to colours used in other devices.   Furthermore, the remote device debugger has been improved and a new function has been included to retrieve projects from devices.  

 

New VBA engine with support to VB.Net

The exclusive Movicon VBA engine has been upgraded.  The Movicon scripting potentialities have been enhanced even further with the new VBA Engine, now capable of guaranteeing VB.Net compatibility.  Further enhancement and improvements in general have been made and are included in the new engine, such as those items which distinguish the power of the Movicon VBA: real multithreading, encapsulated script possible in template objects with project independence, VBA compatibility also in Windows CE. 

 

New base libraries for Drivers

All the drivers have been updated to the new Movicon base/basic libraries to perform better and have new functions, especially where remote control and communication are concerned. 

Data flow management performances, between the drivers and the Movicon RTDB, have been optimized.

The new functions include improvement to the station concept, support to managing multiple communications in more stations in the same driver, consenting to remote connection in multiple modems as well. 

It is now possible to connect on event /command to any single station using a specified telephone number which can be also customized dynamically.

 

 

Windows Vista™ Compatibility and “Look & Feel”

Even though the previous Movicon version is compatible with Windows Vista, Movicon 11 has been fully equipped to support and exploit all the novelties of the new operating system better along with its “Look & Feel”. 

 

 

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Many other minor improvements have been made to give the community of International Movicon users greater freedom of using an even more extremely powerful, simple and flexible product.

It can be truly said that Movicon 11 is the most technologically advanced and innovative Scada/HMI platform on the international market today.

The technology leadership of Progea has been proved by their product’s ever increasing success and user satisfaction, enforced with their chosen strategic partnership with the most important companies in this sector, which include Phoenix Contact, Panasonic, ASEM and Vipa.