Hello PLCnext team,
I had developed an e-HMI for my application. Initially, I had it running in a touchscreen - PC (Atom E3827 Dualcore 1,75 GHz) and the PC started freezing. I checked the CPU consumption and it was above 60%, when the PC had other tasks, then the CPU went to 100% and freezed. I run the e-HMI in Chrome and in Internet Explorer and the consumption was about the same.
We did some possible tests and fixings:
- Reinstall Windows 10 IOT.
- Analyze the Task Manager processes running in the PC in the background.
- Remove all animations in the e-HMI. We actually only left the color screen and one start button. Yet the CPU consumption was still high.
When we run the e-HMI in our service laptop (Ryzen Pro 7 with a dedicated GPU) we could see that the CPU consumption was not really high (about 15%) but the GPU consumption was increased (about 30%). So the final decision was to change he touchscreen - PC to a stronger one (i5 Intel processor with a dedicated GPU) and the performance is about the same as with our service laptop (CPU 15% GPU 30%+).
Even though the problem was solved, I think that the PC is too much for what it is doing. It is a powerful machine (and expensive) for its task. Additionally to the e-HMI, I only have an extra process in the background but it is not consuming much CPU (it increases 5% every 15 minutes when the process is called).
Do you have any idea of what is going on with the PC? Why does the e-HMI requires so much GPU? Is there any alternative that I can use?
Thanks a lot.
Angela.
Hi Angela,
I have seen the same issue when running the eHMI application on an IPC. I can’t tell you why yet, still running some tests.
But the same behavior you can see when you use a Web HMI like a WP 6101. here you will notice that the PLC starts slowing down. How much depends on the HMI application.
The eHMI in PLCNext Engineer is a nice addition, but there are still some improvements to be made before it is really usable. I know that the guy’s from the development are working hard on those.
An alternative would be Visu+. You can run it as standard HMI application or as SCADA application. I do the last, as the HMI application has some restrictions when it comes to data loggers. But that is more based on the Windows CE operating system. You can download Visu+ as a demo and try it.
If you have questions with Visu+, you can drop me a line and I will help.
I agree with some of the comments toward the eHMI, but would like to share my experience.
I’ve been successful with multiple installations of Lenovo M75q’s with Ryzen 3 3.60 GHz, 8 GB RAM, running Win 10 and Edge for the browser. Its only job is running the HMI. No issues with excessive CPU usage, no dedicated GPU either. It runs the eHMI application with more responsiveness than a WP 6101 for comparison. It’s not as rock-solid as a dedicated HMI typically is. The connection does occasionally time out then come back again. Sometimes Edge needs to be restarted to recover.
If your application can tolerate the occasional need to refresh or restart the browser, and work around some of the limitations of the eHMI vs a typical fully featured HMI, it’s very capable. I thoroughly appreciate being able to run the HMI on almost any web capable device, multi-client access, being embedded in the PLC project, and reasonably resource efficient on the PLC side.