Tutorials > Basic tutorials > Display settings

This tutorial explains how to design the screens and work with displays in DEWESoft, there are four known types of controls:

-	controls which typically show all the data (recorder, vertical recorder, xy recorder, GPS map)

-	controls which show a part of data directly or calculated data (scope, FFT, octave, vector scope, harmonic FFT, tabular display)

-	controls which show only one value (digital meter, bar meter, analog meter, indicator lamp)

-	additional controls like pictures, text or lines

All controls can be combined into one single screen or we can build several screens for a specific part of the measurement. There are also predefined screens (like scope, recorder, FFT), but they can be altered to meet user's requirements.

Let's take a look how to use displays and how to set up an ideal display. An Overview display is intended to be defined by the user, but predefined screens can also be altered to meet specific requirements.

Display settings

A conflict of interest arises in that the subsequent chapters describe in greater detail how to incorporate different measurements. This, however, is under the assumption that the user already knows how to create displays (this chapter). For the sake of simplicity in this tutorial, one measurement’s channels will be used to make a display set-up. The next chapter will explain in greater detail how those channels can be acquired.

With DEWESoft software, the user can also find the Example_Drive01 data file. Let's open this file because it has lots of interesting channels for creating the display setup. Go to Overview. Since this display is pretty crowded, let's make another display. This can be achieved by clicking Display properties button ,selecting display template and clicking on Add as main display.

There should now be a blank display in the Design mode. The visual controls can only be added in Design mode, which is selected by clicking the Design button from main menu or on upper left side of display. Now let's see what we got from the channels. We can add one recorder for velocities. Note that there are 8 handles around the recorder. We can adjust the size of the control with dragging those handles. The control can also be moved by dragging the control to the appropriate position.

Design display

There are all four wheel speed measurements. When the recorder is added, the first channel is automatically assigned to it. To deselect this channel, go to the last icon in channel selector to show channels on current visual control and click on all channels to deselect them.

Now we can select the channels to display. Go back to the group view and note that the channels are organized into groups. In this case, there are analog channels, counters, CAN, Math and GPS channels. Let's click on the CAN group and select the Bremse3 message. All four wheel speeds become visible. Clicking on them will add the channel to the selected visual control. Clicking on the selected channel will remove the channel from the visual control. Each visual control has a set maximum amount of channels that can be displayed on them.

With many channels there is much easier way to find the channels. If we know that we want to have "speed" channel, just enter the keyword speed in the search caption. The channel selector will only show channels with the keyword at any point in the string, so it is much easier to find them.

The "Recorder" can hold up to four channels at maximum. This is basically limited by the number of y axis. Since there is only one measured value (speed), we can select to have all the channels related to one single axis by selecting the Single value axis option in the recorder. In this case the recorder can hold up to 16 channels. Now we can add the Velocity channel from GPS. We can browse through the folder structure, but it is much easier to again type "Velocity" keyword.

Visual control actions like zooming or scaling cannot be done while in design mode, so we need to click Design button again to be able to type in the maximum scale or to autoscale the y axis. Since the speed at this test didn't exceed 100 km/h, we can move the mouse over the maximum value of the y axis until it shows a gray rectangle and click on it to enter the value.

Now that this is set, we can click the Design button again to continue building up the display.

It would be nice to have some analog meters to display the vehicle RPM and the speed of the vehicle at the current moment. The recorder shows the entire or the selected time period while the meters show only the current position. In Acquisition mode this is always the current value, while in analyse mode this is related to the position of the yellow cursor. Let's add two analog meters. Select first meter and choose the Eng_RPM from Motor1 message of the CAN bus. Select the other one and choose the GPS velocity. The scaling can changed to more appropriate values. For the Engine RPM (since it was a diesel engine), the user could enter 5000 RPM for the maximum value. We can also choose to use the upper limit (of the alarm) and enter 4000 RPM as the tolerance limit.

Analog meter design

We can also add two digital meters inside the analog meters to show the exact RPM and velocity as a number. The user can add and move the meters and select the channels from the channel selector as was done for the analog meters. Since it is already known that the shown value is velocity, the caption and frame can be switched off by deselecting the Show caption option. To be able to see the analog meter in behind, we can make that the digital meters are fully transparent. Since the RPM shows one decimal, which the user is not interested in, decrease the resolution by one can be selected by the Dec button.

Digital meter design

Now comes to the fun part. Since video camera and GPS are already used, we have two additional visual controls available, which are video camera and GPS map. Let's add both. When trying this independently, the user will not have the GPS sky map behind the traveled path, but how to add this will be covered in the GPS tutorial how to add this. Let's place the controls to make good display screen. Please note that the user can move the controls to the foreground or the background. Since we added the video control later, it will be placed in front of the analog meter. With a right click on the analog meter we can choose Bring to front to bring the control to the foreground. The user can, of course add a visual effect of transparency to the analog meter, so as not to hide the video picture.

Bring to front or sent to back

Let's add some more controls for the outside temperature, satellites used and gas pedal positions to finish it. The display settings can be done in Acquisition and Analysis mode. In Acquisition mode, these settings will be stored to the setup file. If we alter the display settings in the Analysis mode, those settings need to manually stored by those settings with choosing Save icon. We can also use these settings for the next measurement with DEWESoft round button → Use setup for measure.

To be able to really use it, deactivate the Design mode. Now we can zoom in on the recorder and move the yellow cursor to update the digital meter or we can replay the file.

Zoom and replay