Sometimes the material IO icons don't really have a good icon to represent a screen or other SCADA page.
I'm thinking about making a SCADA icons library. I figured I'd reach out to the community for suggestions of icons that would be good to have for Ignition Perspective projects.
In the past I have made icons for a municipal water storage tank, valves and pumps. I would probably also have icons for things like clarifier basins, oxidation ditches, aeration, etc.
I'm looking for more ideas to justify making an Icon library.
Maybe some generic manufacturing process icons: welding, pressing, machining, cutting, etc.
(Super generic) machine icons: robotic arm ... drawing a blank here
We also use SCADA to monitor building utilities/consumables but we had to get a bit creative in using material icons to represent a gas cylinder and the like, so generic utility icons may also be nice.
Having a power systems icon set would be useful as well: Transformer, switch, motor-operated switch, breaker, cap bank, inverter, meter, tracker motor, met station, battery container, battery management system, energy management system, plant controller, etc.
Maybe generic icons for data centers, like coolers/CDUs, racks, etc. There seems to have been an increase in the number of customers using Ignition to monitor data center hardware/buildings.
Someone more familiar in the sector would have to pipe up with more specific items. There is probably a lot of overlap with building utilities as mentioned earlier.
I wonder if it would be possible for an icon management interface to be built into Ignition Designer to allow importing SVG icons for use in Perspective. Could be similar to Image Management but I'd almost prefer it to be exportable with other resources so you could share them on the exchange easily. Each folder could be a collection/library of icons.
Then on the backend Ignition could bundle these into the larger SVG icon library that Perspective uses.
@Steve_Laubach, I like to emphasize the importance of Matt Steele's comment on Power Systems icons. The icons can be in two category of 'engineering' targeting Single Line Diagram and IEEE published symbols and also operator category with more modern look. They will serve the community greatly if such standard library is developed and shared.
Conceptually I like the idea of having a icon management interface. I think there will be some technical challenges with getting imported icon drawings to size properly when scaled to 24x24.
A lot of the free icons out there are scaled to a bunch of different sizes and some of them require a little editing if you resize them to 24x24 (line thickness usually). I'm fine with doing the icon editing outside of Ignition. It would be nice to have an interface to load 24x24 icons without restarting the designer session.
I found a lot of nice power icons on that site Michael Flagler linked. They were all done in a smaller resolution so I upsized them to 24x24.
Right now I'm just dumping all the SCADA icons into the same library but I may organize them into separate libraries down the road.
Note: For those who don't know, icon libraries draw all of icons on top of each other. The designer separates them by their ID. I've attached the SVG for the icon library I'm currently working on. I plan to clean it up a bunch down the road but it sounds like this much would be useful for you. The black box under this paragraph is actually the forum rendering the icon library. You just have to download that SVG (save image as) to get the library.
Refer to the documentation to get them in your project. Note that the library won't show up till you restart your designer.
(These are the 8.1 directions. Select 8.3 from the drop down if you're trying to get them in 8.3. I believe the process changed but haven't had a chance to dig into that yet.)
This is all a work in progress. It could use a little polish. I'm debating on whether to simplify the transformer I drew or remove it entirely. it's way more detailed than it needs to be for a 24x24 icon.
Edit:
I just realized I was responding to an IA person. You probably knew all of this instruction but I'll leave it there for others
Starting new standards development it looks like icons are easier to manipulate over drawings. The color property is exposed. Any other benefits? I am leaning on using customer icons over drawings for my pump's secondary icons
For icons, you're loading the entire icon library to use any icons in the library but then reusing that load once it's loaded. I'd imagine it's possible to go crazy enough with icons to impact load time but you're probably paying that cost only at load time.
You could make icons with a higher level detail if you want but I think it's best to make them simple like material icons. I think there's a fairly good argument to have icons in your library for indicators to show states relevant to devices and stuff like that (ex. A/M indicator or alarm bell).
I haven't tested it but you could probably have a faster load time if you used icons for symbols instead of embedded SVGs. I think the icon library would already be loaded before it tries to load the screen so it would display an instance of the icon based on a reference to the icon library. Your animations would be limited to a solid color animation which is fine for some places and not fine for others.
I plan to test this when I get a chance. It would be interesting to compare load times of 1000 instances of devices based on icons vs 1000 embedded SVGs using the same SVG. I assume the icon one would load faster. It would also be interesting to animate them and see if there's a performance difference there. Past tests have shown that the embedded SVGs can animate pretty fast even with close to 1000 instances on the screen.
It depends if you need to animate (eg colour) anything but everything. If you do or will, then icons are a no go (you can only animate colour of everything). You also can't animate stroke and fill differently.
If this isn't an issues, icons might be feasible
Hmm I I probably won't be using it any further than that but you make a good point. Ill leave it as a drawing in case I want more flexibility thank you!
