I have posted several times about some various techniques or strategies and how to achieve them.
For the most part – those posts merely highlighted some neat features with a pretty generic example as a way to hopefully inspire you with your own ideas for how to use them.

In this post – I want to share something with a real world application that will eventually be offered to the public as a simple tool to help our customers.
This is a functional but not a finished product. For our release to the public through our website – I will brand it accordingly.
For this – you get my generic layout.

Now – to be fair – this topic may not be very interesting for most – but it does highlight the potential for some things that Captivate is capable of.

A Little Background

In my job, in addition to curriculum development for face-to-face seminars and workshops, I create lots of tools that demonstrate, assist, or walk customers through how to configure various aspects of our products in the form of individual modules or full online courses.
This would be an example of a tool used to help make life easier – offered at no charge.

I work in the weighing industry with high-end scales and weight indicators. These weight indicators need to be properly configured to match the capacity of the scale to which they will be connected. Then they are calibrated with certified test weights to ensure that they read accurately.

Configuration of the capacity often becomes a challenge for many installation teams as there is not only some math to figure out but some guidelines and regulations to follow as well.

When a load is placed on a scale, operators will read the display to see how much the load weighs. The display will change in multiples of 1, 2, or 5 with either one or more decimal places or one or two zero placeholders to create a count-by of 50, or 100 for example. The tricky part is that you must configure the scales using a parameter called graduations which is basically the number of equal parts that the total capacity is divided up into. A simple example is that if I have a 1000 pound scale that I wish to have count by 1 pound increments – I would need 1000 graduations. (1000 ÷ 1) The math is very simple, really – (Capacity ÷ Count-by) – but we all know that eyes can easily glaze over for many people and a 750 pound scale that counts by 0.2 pounds could prove to be a frustration for some.

For performance reasons, the number of graduations is recommended to stay within 1000 to 10,000. In some cases – legal for trade criteria may limit that even further. The problem is – weight indicators don’t know which scales are legal for trade or what the rules are and will accept pretty much any combination of values we set them up for. The burden of making sure that the configuration meets a particular standard as dictated by the local department of weights and measures lies with the installation crew and the customer.

All that said – this project is a calculator that quickly determines the number of graduations required for a particular capacity and count-by combination.  The idea is that for those who struggle this will be a welcome tool. Even with the calculator on your cell phone – you can still come up with wrong values if you don’t remember how to manipulate the numbers and you end up wasting precious time and money.

Some Project Features

There are several subtle things to be observed here.

• The project will highlight those combinations which would be in an acceptable range (1000 to 10,000 graduations) and present them to you in green while hiding all of those which are out of tolerance.
• A toggle button to show all combinations is provided. Combinations considered out of tolerance will be shown in red.
• As long as the Show All parameter is selected, all combinations will be shown. Deselecting this will hide all out of tolerance values.
• There is no Submit button – all entered capacity values will update the combinations in real time.
• You are limited to entry of whole number values between 0 and 9999999.
• This calculator would require much less time to create in MS Excel.

Although the calculator will accept values like 3762 – no one would set a scale up that way. Those in the industry who will make use of this tool know that – so I did not see the need to build in any extra error checking for it.
I considered an option that uses sliders to select programmed values but felt it was quicker to just key in the capacity so I did not pursue that any further.

Have a look and feel free to ask any questions that you have.