This is a short article to describe how to create faceplates within a popup screen in TIA portal 15.1. The faceplate is a feature used to create an individually configured display for certain objects/components within your system to show more details/information related to it. You can use faceplates several times in different projects. In this tutorial we will create a popup faceplate for flow meter calibration and display the flow rate value and as below:
First of all, we need to create a PLC Data Type and this is a very important step to create the faceplates.
1- Create PLC Data Type, you can create just one data type and use it for multiple flow meters where all the faceplate’s components will be controlled by the PLC. It summarizes different tags that describe the operating object as one group. Note that, you need to use a user data type HMI UDT in case using a SIMATIC S7–300/400 controllers, PLC data type can be used with a SIMATIC S7–1200 or S7–1500 controllers.
2- Drop the earlier created data type and placed into a new data block, PLC data type should be integrated into a faceplate because UDT is only for PLC it cannot be accessed through faceplate view, so we need to tell the project that PLC data type must be a global data type to the whole project, to do that select Libraries > Project library > Open the Types folder then, drag and drop the PLC data type into the opened Types folder.
3- Create a popup screen and select all the items that you want to include it into a faceplate then, right-click > create faceplate.
4- In properties page, link the PLC tags to the selected faceplate’s objects with just drag & drop. As in the below example, the "I/O field" object was used to enter min/max values and display flow meter reading.
5- Click on release version option.
6- Drag the latest version of the faceplate to the screen, then go to properties > interface and add PLC data type tag.
7- In order to open/close the popup screen, go to properties > events page and use the command ShowPopupScreen. For example, if a button is clicked, open the pop-up-screen.
ShowPopupScreen parameters:
- Name of the screen, select what screen to open/close
- X & Y coordinates, determine the position of the screen on the x-axis & y-axis.
- Display mode, on or off.
- Animation, the direction from which the pop-up screen is shown.
- Animation speed, The speed at which a popup opens/closes.
Finally the Simulation
8- Compile and upload the program to the CPU, click Run time on the PC option.
In this post, I tried to summarize faceplate basics in a simple way, hope it will help anyone who interested in knowing more about faceplates. Thank you for reading. As always, If you have any questions, concerns, or want to share more information about the topic discussed above, feel free to contact me through Gmail or LinkedIn.
References
1 — Help, information system, TIA Portal 15.1 software.
2 — Basics on HMI faceplates, siemens industry support.
