Nuts and Volts - May 2014

Finally, we arranged all of them in a row using the keyboard arrow keys; the result looks like Figure 9.

Next, we labeled each LED with its corresponding binary weight from 7 (MSB) on the left to 0 (LSB) on the far right. This time, we switched to the Controls 1 tab to select the oLabel; using the Text Box in the drop-down menu, we set the numbers from 7 to 0 as in Figure 10.

That configures the individual LEDs, but we also want to see the numerical value of the eight digital signals, so that requires a Text Box. To do this, we grabbed an o Text box and dragged it under the LEDs to display the numerical value (Figure 11). Then, we dragged another oLabel and named it Binary Value.

So, that’s about it for the digital signals. Now, let’s add some window dressing to our customized Interface.

Dressing Things Up

While the meters and buttons for analog and digital signal monitoring are now on the My_Interface.spm, what remains is a way to finish things off. Let’s do that with some yellow vertical and horizontal borders. In our last example To do this, simply do a shift-right-click on any of the vertical bars and click the Duplicate button. This will bring up more of the same. Next, use the arrow keys to resize them and move them into place. The result should look like Figure 12 when complete. You’ll notice that the meters, buttons, and switches are now bordered by the same horizontal and vertical bars as the menu area.

Saving Our Work

While the graphic part of the interface is complete, we’re not done yet. What remains is to save our work to the My_Interface.spm file. To start, you’ll need to click on the Macro Builder icon in the tool bar to bring up the Macro Builder drop-down menu (Figure 13). Then, click on the Update from Current button that will load in all the graphic code for the meters, buttons, switches, labels, and text boxes that have been added. What’s left is to click on the traditional floppy disk icon to save our work to the My_Interface.spm file.