Unusual user interface

[Falevoz Y.]

Hello,

is a video that show the user interface I did for a European research project called MINAmI. The goal of the project part on which I worked was to do an home automation system demonstrator.

One of the program I did was the one which should be used by the installer. It has to give functionalities to draw the house plan, place sensors, calibrate sensors and do some supervision.

This video was made for FuturVIEW 2008 (the second French days on graphical programming for measurement and instrumentation with LabVIEW software).

• The first sequence shows how you can draw a plan.
  
• The second, how you can place sensors on the plan.
  
• The third shows the calibration step for a sensor based on how work the rabbits retina. There is a split screen part in this sequence where you can see what the installer do for calibration, the retina, and what the retina show.
  
• The fourth is a supervision sequence. You can see that when the door is opened or shut, the plan is updated. Same for the infra-red sensor that become red on the plan when someone is detected.
  
• The fifth shows that communications are bidirectional. They are based on a SOC developed by Hager security that is very low power consumption (10y on battery).
  

Yann

[shoneill]

Interesting.

How many man-hours did that software take to produce? Looks relatively complicated....

Nice example of what can be done with picture controls though.

Shane.

[Falevoz Y.]

CITATION(shoneill @ Dec 17 2008, 11:48 AM)

Interesting.

How many man-hours did that software take to produce? Looks relatively complicated....

Nice example of what can be done with picture controls though.

Shane.

I'd say nearly 3-4 month. I was alone. I used LVOOP to do it. The class diagram done, most things were simple. The complicated point was all the rules to implement to stop a room move when you arrive on another room or a door move when you arrive at the end of the wall...

Yann.

[shoneill]

I reckoned it was LVOOP alright. Wouldn't want to attack the code otherwise.

"The class diagram done, most things were simple". Ah, but therein lies the trickery of LVOOP. Getting the classes "done". Especially for Plebs like me who have trouble thinking in OOP.

Shane.

[Yair]

Yes, definitely an impressive use of the picture control. I also liked the traced video image. I assume that this was done with a standard IMAQ VI.

[CarlosCalderon]

It is a very interesting application.

You only need a touch of user interface design. But functionality is very powerful.

It is a very good product. Too good!

You know, a product must be of quality but also to be attractive to users. ¡Eye on this!

[Falevoz Y.]

CITATION(Yair @ Dec 17 2008, 08:07 PM)

I also liked the traced video image. I assume that this was done with a standard IMAQ VI.

In the split screen sequences, I said that you can see what the retina see. This is not done with labwiew. You can connect to a java applet for retina configuration. These pictures come from this applet and are the input for the internal DSP. In normal use, the retina doesn't transmit any picture. Its DSP do the image processing and transmit data as coordinates of mobiles in the room, if they are human or pet, if a human is falling...

Yann

[Falevoz Y.]

CITATION(shoneill @ Dec 17 2008, 05:31 PM)

"The class diagram done, most things were simple". Ah, but therein lies the trickery of LVOOP. Getting the classes "done". Especially for Plebs like me who have trouble thinking in OOP.

I use to say that the class diagram has to be as close as possible to the real world. It make the development more intuitive and the code more comprehensible. I this case, I had a class "houseplan" that is composed of "stairs", and "stairs" are composed of "room". A particular room is the "staircase" (inheritance). On walls of the "room", you can find "openings" that can be "door" or "window (inheritance and polymorphism). After that I wonder what I need to know for each element. The houseplan attribute is its scale. For "room" and "openings", attributs are position and dimention. Then I wonder what I want to do with these elements. I want to save, load, draw, move... them. Here are the methods of each class...

Yann

[shoneill]

Whenever I try to do design an object hierarchy like that, I always end up missing something. So I end up starting with an educated guess at the object structure. I suppose I'll get better with experience. It tool LVOOP to make me actually understand the benefit of OOP. I was always one of those who thought "What's the point of OOP".

I think I've more or less grasped it now though. Not that I don't have heaps still to learn. C'est la vie.

Shane.