Documentation

[bmbrown97]

All --

I'm either blind, or more than likely completely lost due to incompetence.. but I have been searching high and low for the namespace documentation on the various AdvancedHMI namespaces. In particular, I am hunting at the moment the MfgControl.AdvancedHMI.Drivers documentation to understand the various classes, methods, etc that are in there.

As mentioned.. I'm sure it's staring me right in the face and if it were a snake, I would be dead by now, but any help someone can provide to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Brian.

[Archie]

You are not overlooking anything. Since income is generated through training classes, none of the documentation has been made publicly available with the exception of the Basic Label Training Manual.

The software has been designed from ground up with ease of use in mind which makes it very easy to get started creating basic HMIs. For going beyond the basic HMI, this forum has a lot of information and examples of using the drivers and controls via code.

[Vitor]

I have a proposal.
Some of us could post some articles and build a sort of manual under Archies supervision.
In first place must have an table of contents.
IMO it can be build and storage in sourcefourge in a directory.

[Archie]

I have a proposal.
Some of us could post some articles and build a sort of manual under Archies supervision.
In first place must have an table of contents.
IMO it can be build and storage in sourcefourge in a directory.

It would be a good idea to assemble a community contributed manual. There is a lot of good information spread across several forums that cannot be found in any other place.

[bmbrown97]

>none of the documentation has been made publicly available

Okay.. So what's the chances of buying the documentation? I understand you want to make money off of training and such, however, to cover all the travel expenses for a training class is going to be a bit out of my budget.

[Archie]

>none of the documentation has been made publicly available

Okay.. So what's the chances of buying the documentation? I understand you want to make money off of training and such, however, to cover all the travel expenses for a training class is going to be a bit out of my budget.

The idea of putting documentation on the web site for sale was tossed around and even started at one point. This quickly turned into a maintenance issue. Since AdvancedHMI uses the philosophy of "Release early, Release often" (a principle of Agile), it became more tedious to keep the documentation up to date than to add new features to the software. So it was decided to put that on the back burner and use training as the means to convey the updates.

The cost of training is often brought up as a concern, but it only takes the cost of a single WonderWare or FactoryTalk license to add up to more than the cost of AdvancedHMI training. Or you can think of it as using AdvancedHMI in place of a PanelView. The cost difference of a PanelPC to a PanelView is about the cost of 2-3 days of AdvancedHMI training.

But the cost issue is being addressed. There will soon be the option of remote training that will eliminate the travel expenses.

[leovailati]

I have a proposal.
Some of us could post some articles and build a sort of manual under Archies supervision.
In first place must have an table of contents.
IMO it can be build and storage in sourcefourge in a directory.

That is a good idea

[Noe]

Maybe a user maintained Wiki with Archie as Admin? Other projects use this and works really fine.

[Archie]

Maybe a user maintained Wiki with Archie as Admin? Other projects use this and works really fine.

This sounds like a good idea, so I created a Wiki for everyone to help build online documentation:

http://www.advancedhmi.com/documentation

[Noe]

Really glad to hear that! I will try to share what I can.

[Archie]

Throughout the coming weeks I am going to try to create some basic pages to try to establish a standard page format. If you see anything that can be done better to make it easier to read, let me know.