Displays

The HCA window is divided into two sections. On the left is the design pane, which displays each element of your home design organized as an outline. On the right is the display pane which displays either floor plans, if you have DXF files or picture files, or displays icons in a grid pattern. The two panes can be resized by dragging the splitter bar between the two panes. If the display pane is re-sized, floor plans are re-scaled in such a way as to preserve their shape.

HCA Floor Plan

While HCA does not contain a drawing editor, it does import or link to DXF files or picture files created by most popular drawing programs. If you would like more information about drawing programs and their use with HCA, check out the Drawing Programs Technical Note.

If you don't have floor plans, you can still create floors in your design. In this case the display pane operates like the Windows Explorer when in large icon view. You have the option to have HCA auto arrange icons by name, or by their housecode and unitcode. If you want, create your own arrangements by dragging icons into any order and placement needed.

HCA Icons

In addition to icons, a display can show any HTML file or URL. Many facilities you use in your home like cameras, security, energy management, and entertainment, can be accessed from a browser and so can be integrated into your HCA display. Here are for examples of this using HTML displays and the Control User Interface.

Energy Management

Cameras

Security

Entertainment

Tiled Displays

Each of the display types described above is of a single type - the display only shows icons or only shows an HTML file. It is possible to create tiled displays to show more than one type of display each in a sub-window or tile of a display. For example this is a tiled display that has five tiles each showing icons. Three tiles have DXF backgrounds.

Tiled Example 1

In this display, there are six tiles: Four are image tiles, one is an alert tile, and one is a text tile.

Tiled Example 2

In a tiled display you can have tiles of these types:

  1. Alerts
  2. Blank
  3. Graph
  4. HTML
  5. Icons
  6. Image
  7. Power Meter
  8. Text

The sample home installed with HCA shows many uses of tiled displays.