I have a static display of a pump curve that I would like to animate with SCADA data, but I’m not sure where to start. I have two expressions that calculate total dynamic head and pump flow in million gals per day. I would like to overlay the crossing of the two and make active cross hair or bulls eye. Is this doable without too much effort? Attached is the pump curve and typical data points.
Henry, I’ve done something just like that with the 2D canvas in cases where I couldn’t use the standard charts. One one chart, I “stack” various downtime totals within one hour time slices, and use click events to bring up additional detail from the chart.
On another chart, I log IO events to a timeline and use “crosshairs” to pan around and zoom and measure things like applitude and duration. Drawing your chart on a canvas would be well within the capabilities, and the results would be very nice.
On the other hand, you had mentioned “without too much effort”. 
There is a learning curve with the canvas, but once you get the hang of it you can do anything you want, from layering, adding realtime animation and transparency, whatever. But if you’d like to take a stab at it, I can help out, or maybe the gurus here know of a way to make it work with the standard charts.
I’m going to have to go ahead and give you an honest answer, which is “no”.
I totally agree with Step7 - it’s the kind of thing that could conceivably be done with the paintable canvas or even better with a quick module that someone could throw together. But both of those options certainly violate the “with little effort” requirement.
If this is an absolute requirement we can talk about having us write a custom module that provided a specialty chart component that would do this. You’d want to start by describing what the underlying data looks like. This type of work isn’t cheap, of course, but it would probably be the best way forward.
(For the IA guys):
Is it possible to set a background image for a chart in Ignition? It may be a little crude, but that way you could maybe just use an XY Plot over your image.
http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/api/gjdoc/org/jfree/chart/JFreeChart.html#setBackgroundImage:Image
Henry,
You could also overlay a Chart component with an image component to accomplish this, but it’s a little tricky to get set up the first time (namely, avoiding relative scaling which throws off your initially well-lined-up components). It’s crude as well, but seems to work for me.
The basic steps are:
-Put the image in a container with a chart component. Obviously you’d want an image without the test data in it.
-Hard-code the axis bounds on the chart. NO auto range.
-Hide the legend, axes, etc on the cart
-Set plot background color of the chart to have a 0 alpha
-On the chart, make the Data property columns mdg and tdh
-On the chart customizer, create a numeric x-axis and set DataSet properties to XY Line, Shapes only
-set both the chart and image to be anchored to all sides of the container
-Line up the image and the Chart component closely, the grid marks of the plot will overlap nicely if you size it correctly
-anchor the container (since the chart and image don’t overlay well when relative scaling comes into play)
–Put some data into the Chart’s data property
I was able to do this with your image, see if it works when you place the attached cropped image in the root of your images folder then import the attached window. It was created with 7.1.6, and importing into 7.2 seemed a little off (need to retweak it), but importing into another 7.1.6 gateway worked fine. I have three data points represented by blue dots. Maybe something like this will work for you.
Dan
GraphImageOverlay.vwin (56 KB)
Oooh, I thought that was a dynamically calculated graph. Only the blue part is dynamic? That makes it much much easier. In that case - I like the graph-over-image idea.
Thanks,