SUMMARY

HCA supplies over 40 icons for your use in representing devices, programs, and groups on your floors.  We knew we could not anticipate all your needs so HCA comes with the Icon Gallery.  This tool, accessed from the Home menu, allows you to add any icons that you have drawn using any Windows based drawing or paint program that can save its files in bitmap (.bmp) format.  This note discusses issues of icon size and colors you need to use.

Designing your own icons

The hardest part of adding icons to HCA is being able to draw what you want with a paint program.  Simply put, it is a lot harder than you might think!  The 44 icons used in HCA to represent devices, programs, and groups were created by a graphic artist.

Before you start creating icons it is important to understand a few terms:

Icon or Bitmap
In HCA the pictures that represent each device in your design is called an icon.   The pictures themselves are created from Windows bitmap files.  Windows does have an icon file type but that is not the same thing.  When you create your own icons you must create a file of type bitmap.  These are usually with a .BMP file type.

Transparent color
This is the color in the icon that is replaced with the background, ON, OFF, and DIM colors.  By replacing the transparent color with the background color (as selected by you in the HCA properties dialog in the color tab) the icon appears to blend into the background rather than appear as a icon on a colored square.  It's important to remember that any pixels of this color anywhere in the bitmap is replaced with the background, on, off, or dim color when the icon is drawn.

Background color
The color selected in the HCA properties dialog on the color tab that provides the background color of display pane.

ON color
The color that replaces the icon's transparent color when the device represented by the icon is ON.

OFF color
The color that replaces the icon's transparent color when the device represented by the icon is OFF.

DIM color
The color that replaces the icon's transparent color when the device represented by the icon is DIM.

Each HCA built-in icon is used to represent a device in each one of its states: ON, OFF, or DIM.  As described above, this is done by replacing the transparent color of the icon with the ON color when ON, the DIM color when DIM, and the window background color (selectable by you) when the device is OFF.

Depending upon your needs, you can create one icon that is used for the ON state, another for the OFF state, and a third for the DIM state.  Or create just one icon and have HCA use that to create the other representations.   For example, suppose you are creating an icon for an Acme 1000 widget.  You could

You create: ACME.bmp

You create: ACME.bmp, ACME_ON.bmp

You create: ACME.bmp, ACME_ON.bmp, ACME_DIM.bmp

It depends upon what you are creating the icon for and how you want it to appear when you decide to draw all its representations yourself or allow HCA to create them for you from the OFF representation.

A good way to get started is to take one of the built-in HCA icons and modify it to your needs.  To help you we have provided a zip file containing all the HCA device, program, and group icons.  Within this zip file are individual BMP files.  The filename and which icon they represent should be obvious.  To download that zip file, click here.

You can use the Windows paint program to create or modify icons.  It offers only very limited drawing options but for simple icons or small modification it does work.   Make sure with whatever drawing program you use that the file is saved as a 256 color bitmap.

Adding icons to HCA

Icons are added to HCA using the Icon Galley.  This is started by selecting Open Icon Gallery from the Home menu.  Using the Icon Gallery is described in the User Guide.

 A set of additional icons, contributed from HCA users is available here.

A few more notes