The Basic Controls toolbox

Basic Controls toolbox

The Basic Controls toolbox contains the following objects:

Generic Button
Button 1
Button 2
Button 3
Button 4
Button 5
Button 6
Button 7
Knob
Rotary switch
Slider
Numeric Input

Note

These controls can be used to provide interactive signal input during simulation, as described in Interactive signal input during simulation. The Numeric Input primitive allows you to enter a numeric value through your numeric keypad as described in Basic Controls. These controls can be linked with tunable parameters (see the Submodel Editor documentation).

Basic controls can be used to change parameters (in Parameter mode), and to change the parameters of the external input component during a simulation (see Linking an object with Simcenter Amesim parameters).

The buttons have the standard position, scale, rotation and opacity properties. In addition they can be on (1) or off (0). This is handled through the State property, which toggles the button between the two states. You can either click directly on the button to switch its state, or enter the appropriate value in the State value field.

Button off	Button on

The Knob, the Rotary switch and the Slider have some or all of the following pre-defined properties:

• Style

• Start/End

• Value

• Position (X, Y)

• xscale

• yscale

• Rotation (angle in degrees. This angle can also be negative)

• Interval

• Steps

• Text size, font, color

You can also click on these graphic primitives and manipulate them to adjust their values by hand.

Note

You must use the rubber-band selection method to select these graphic primitives (use the mouse to drag a selection rectangle over the graphic primitive) as clicking directly on the control is interpreted as operating it - pushing a button, moving a slider etc.

The use of these objects is described in Objects and their Property types, but we will examine the Slider in this section.

The Slider

The Slider is probably the most interesting control graphic primitive, as it can be used to manipulate parameters very easily during a simulation (see Interactive signal input during simulation).

Here we describe its properties (not including the standard x, y, xscale, yscale, opacity, rotation and text properties).

Property	Result
Style 0 and 1
Start/End
Value
The Value property can be controlled by moving the slider with the mouse, or editing the value in the Object inspector. This allows the slider to manipulate parameter values in Simcenter Amesim during simulation. See Interactive signal input during simulation.
Interval
The Interval value defines the increments for the slider movement. In the above screenshot, the Interval is set to 5, meaning the slider will advance in increments of 5 when moved: 0 - 5 - 10 - 15 etc.
Steps
This property defines the number of steps displayed on the slider. With a start value of 0 and an end of 100, selecting 5 steps means 5 interval values are displayed on the slider (20, 40, 60, 80, 100), whereas when the property is set to 10, the values displayed on the slider are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100.