I got into electronics around 1972 when I was a teenager.
I had been into arts, writing, photography, model making. But in electronics I saw a clear career path and a good intellectual challenge.
I worked as a technician for about 5 years before getting involved in my church. I worked with them for 26 years, then came back into electronics.
Phidgets were developed by Saul Greenberg around 2001. I think I found out about them about ten years later. I was learning about programming at a community college and developing my hobby in the direction of interactive art. I bought my first hub (1011 S/N 269016) back then, but was overwhelmed by the programming learning curve.
Meanwhile I found a new technician job at Schweitzer Engineering Labs (SEL) in Pullman Washington. This got me interested in industrial automation, as I was working in a factory that used a lot of automation technology.
At home I was working with a combination of hard-wired analog and CMOS ICs, and just getting into using the Arduino platform. I preferred to hard wire my projects, as all you had to do was turn them on. But having a programmed platform gave me a lot more flexibility in my designs. Arduino has had the limitation that it does not communicate well with PCs. So I wanted something that could take advantage of the computer's human interaction features more fully. And I remembered phidgets. I found a "new" 1019 hub on eBay (S/N 178287 / Ver 904) and was impressed that it seemed fully functional. So now I have two hubs to play with.
I started with the little hub and put together a little temperature sensor (based on the LM335Z), plugged it into an analog input port and, sure enough, could monitor its output using the Control Panel.
But I wanted to build out this idea into what I would call an HMI application (Human-Machine Interface). I started with Thonny (never used before) with tkinter. I wanted to start with a window that would simply show the temperature reading. I had to somehow combine the code for the phidget (using events) with the tk code for a window. I could find almost zero online help on how to do this. I finally got some code to work, though it exits problematically.
The next step up is HMI developement software. But most "pro" HMIs work with PLCs, SCADA and databases. I don't need any of that functionality, though I suspect that some of Phidget's more serious users might.
What I would like to put to the community (which I suspect includes Phidget's own engineers) is this:
Are industry-level HMIs an unexplored area for Phidget products?
What are the best solutions other users have come up with to provide graphical objects for users to interact with phidgets?
Does anyone have some perfectly working code to share for a very simple application like the one I described above?
Products for USB Sensing and Control
