Electric Kiln/Usage/LCD Interface
LCD usage
LCD menu has few main screens:
- Menu screen - where you can select other screens (you can always go here with long press >0,7s)
- Main screen view - where you can see running program, it's parameters and progress
- screen 1 - basic informations on program status (Ready,Run,Paused,Failed,Ended), current time, start and ETA time. Target step temperature, current kiln temperature, ambient temperature and housing temperature. Step number and type (_r_un/_d_well), heating percent time (this is how long heater is working in "PID_Window" time from prefs).
- screen 2 - simple graph of the program and current progress (inverses colour with progress)
- screen 3 - action screen: start, stop, pause, abort
- Program list - you can browser all programs on your SPIFFS "/programs" directory
- program description - program summary screen with name, short description, max. temperature and program time.
- program show - all program steps
- program load - load selected program to RUN memory - this is going to be your running program
- program delete - removes program from disk
- program description - program summary screen with name, short description, max. temperature and program time.
- Quick program - allows you to create one step program with desire temperature, time and dwell
- Information - some basic informations like IP, WiFi status, WiFi type
- Preferences - shows current (in memory, not from disk) preferences
- Restart WiFi - restarts WiFi stack. Can be useful after preference change or if you lost WiFi connection.
- About - where to find more informations
- Restart - restarts device
- Main screen view - where you can see running program, it's parameters and progress
Main view - program screen
Since there are many information on first program screen, I'll try to explain them all here. Idea was to have every important information visible on single screen.
From the top and left:
- First line is the program name
- First field of the second line is current program status - it can be Ready, Running, Paused, Ended, Aborted. When in Running mode, you will see three animated dots
- Second field is current time (this time is acquired from NTP servers if Internet is present, or from configuration file - if not).
- Next two lines are program start date/time (month-day hours:minutes:seconds) and estimated program END time. ETA is calculated based on the program but will change during it's run - depending on conditions and configuration.
On the bottom there are two lines with current temperature and program settings. This screen changes slightly depending on program status (Running or not). From the left:
- Ct - Current temperature - this is temperature currently measured with your thermocouple
- St - Set temperature - this is temperature currently designated by program progress
- Amb - Ambient temperature - since all MAX chips have additional temperature sensor for thermocouple compensation, this is temperature of the MAX chip, so also the ambient temperature of your working area
- Stp - Step - This is current program step number / total number of steps. There is also indication if this is _r_unning phase or _d_well phase
- Ht - Heat percentage - this is value predicted by PID algorithm and indicated how long heating element should work in "PID_Window" size (default 5s). So if it's 20% - heating element will work 1s every 5th second.
- Cse - Case temperature - if you have additional MAX and thermocouple, this is it's value. By design this should be temperature of the kiln housing.