HMI: Simulation and debugging made simple

Mecel Populus 4.2 comes with a full simulation environment where all application data used by the HMI can be easily simulated from the Populus Editor, either manually or by writing scripts for more automatic simulations. The Populus HMI Debugger can at the same time be used to debug the HMI during run-time.

Since the Mecel Populus architecture has been designed for distributed applications from the start you can seamlessly simulate and debug an HMI on PC, on the target HW or an HMI running on your colleague’s target across the globe as long as you have some kind of network connection between the PC running the editor and the target.

When a new project is started it is vital that the HMI development can start as quickly as possible so that the customer can get deliveries as often as possible early on in the project. Since HMI requirements often change many times during the course of a project, the earlier the customer can have working prototypes of the HMI the better it is for all parties since the customer can play around with the system and early on realize the mistakes that inevitably has been made when the requirements have been produced.

A solution to this is often to produce specific prototypes, either in Flash or some other prototyping environment. Even when the HMI developers use a tool chain that can be used both for prototyping and production it is often difficult to get a useful HMI prototype up a running quickly since the HMI is dependent on the applications to provide data and other input to the HMI. Most prototypes and demos become very limited in their scope because it is too much work to make them functioning properly without the real applications.

With Mecel Populus 4 the HMI developers can start to produce the production HMI right from the start of the project and deliver it in short iterations to the customer for review. The developers can try out their HMI before any application SW has been written by setting data and send events manually from the Populus Runtime Data Editor. Or they can write simulation scripts to drive the HMI. If the HMI developer has software development skills, he/she can also program a simulated application using the C++ or Java Functional Unit SDK that comes with Mecel Populus. In the latter case, the application interface is generated from Mecel Populus so the interface will be identical with the interface used by the production application ensuring compatibility between the simulated application and the production application.

At the customer side, the simulation environment built into Mecel Populus can be used to drive the HMI so that the customer can get a feeling of how the entire production HMI will behave with very little extra work from the HMI developers. This leads to much quicker turn-around times and improved productivity for all parties.