KineticaRT Instrumentation Components for .Net (
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There is no shortage of graphic add-on components for .Net that simplify the task of adding charts, graphs, and diagrams to your applications. Most of these tools are aimed at business uses, however, and are not appropriate if your needs are more along th
There is no shortage of graphic add-on components for .Net that simplify
the task of adding charts, graphs, and diagrams to your applications. Most of
these tools are aimed at business uses, however, and are not appropriate if your
needs are more along the lines of industrial control and monitoring. When I was
recently working on a program that connects to instrumentation for the
measurement of air pollution, I was thinking that I would have to roll my own
graphical elements--until I discovered KineticaRT.
KineticaRT markets a line of .Net components that are designed for control
and monitoring tasks. What do I mean by this? In industrial and research
scenarios, computers are often connected to external equipment and serve to
monitor and/or control the equipment. If you want to graphically display a
temperature, a pressure, or a flow rate on-screen, you want to do so in a way
that is easy to read and appropriate for the task. Many of the KineticaRT
controls are designed to look like their physical counterparts, so a program
screen can mimic the appearance of a control panel. For example, the dial
control, shown in Figure 1, looks a lot like a physical dial. This can be an
advantage when an organization is switching to computerized control because you
can make the screen look like the instruments that were used in the past.
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The Dial control shows a single channel of data. There is also a multi-needle
dial control that shows multiple values by displaying multiple needles on one
dial. The Slider control shows a single vertical or horizontal linear scale with an
indicator arrow, and there's a Multi-needle Slider as well. The Trend control
provides a scrolling, multi-channel pen-chart display. Some controls, such
as the Knob (shown in Figure 2) can be used for input as well as output by using
the mouse to "turn" the knob to the desired setting. I have not mentioned all
the controls--you can visit the publisher's web site for a complete listing and
descriptions of all the controls.
KineticaRT also provides some logical controls that do not display but are
used behind the scenes to provide functionality that is often needed in control
and monitoring applications. These include the Channels control, which provides
links between different controls or between a control and a server. The
Expressions control evaluates mathematical and logical expressions that involve
channels--for example, given a voltage channel and a current channel, you could
use Expressions to calculate watts. Finally, the Filters control lets you apply
a variety of filters, such as low-pass and high-pass, to channel data.
Most of the KineticaRT controls support Live Update, which is their term for
linking the Source and Destination properties of two or more controls so that
data flows automatically from one to the other without need for custom
programming. Many controls support run-time drag-and-drop configuration, which permits
development of instrumentation interfaces that can be customized at run-time.
For example, you might have 10 temperature channels but not enough screen real
estate to display them all at once. You could have a single Dial control and let
the user decide which channel to display by dragging it from a list and dropping
it on the Dial. Many controls support thresholds, values you set that, when
exceeded, can be used to trigger alarms or other events. In Figure 1 you can see
three set thresholds as indicated by the colored triangles on the scale.
