Seeing is understanding

The most striking aspects of Mitsubishi Electric's new Swedish-made HMI units are their large, clear colour mimic screens. Whereas HMI's and PLCs used to perhaps have a two line LCD or VFD text display only a few years ago, the E1000 range come with either 6.4 inch 640 x 480, 10.4 inch 800 x 600 or 15 inch 1024 x 768 pixel 65,536 colour TFT screens. Hugh Tasker, Mitsubishi's Business Development Manager, Automation Systems Division said that the ratio of sales of HMIs to PLCs is currently about 1:4 but he expected this to rise of 1:2 over the next two years. 65 per cent of Mitsubishi UK's HMI sales are currently touch screen although the company is presently offering the option of buttons round the outside of the screen on the two smaller screen size options. The units have Intel XScale (ARM) RISC processors with 32MB of flash and 64MB of RAM. This is necessary to give fast polling and to keep the colour displays up to date in real time. The units are virus proof, we are told because the plug-ins do not allow anyone to add additional applications and the units use only a very basic version of the Windows CE.NET operating system. All units include a power LED. We are told that the East Coast main railway line was once shut down because a unit without such indication went into power save mode, and an operator thought it has crashed and re-booted it. An internal CF card allows application memory to be expanded to 1024MB. Over 100 communication drivers are available, giving the units open connection to PLCs, inverters and servers from most automation suppliers. List prices are £1344 for the 6.5 inch, £2088 for the 10 inch and £2600 for the 15 inch model. Mitsubishi Electric Factory Automation