Hi BRT Community,
Many thanks for your reply. I'm not sure how to upload pictures in order to show some example views that I'm aiming for, so I'll try to explain as briefly as I can.
My spectrogram data arrives at the GUI (software) as a vector of 128 pixel values - i.e. 128 different colour values, where this vector is updated at a rate of about 100 Hz. This is obviously faster than the supported frame rate, so my software will need to lower the rate, which I can do by grouping the data into chunks of 5 (columns) x 128 (rows) at 100/5 = 20 Hz. So the challenge is then to left-shift the current bitmap left by 5 columns, discarding the left-most 5 columns and filling the 5 right-most columns with my new data. The aim is a view that scrolls from right to left in real time. Given a width of 800 pixels and 100 columns per second, the view should hold 8 seconds of data at any instant. I have this working already on a very simple SPI display (128x240) using the ST7735 controller chip.
I have another type of view in which I'd like to update an entire bitmap, of roughly 256x256 pixels, at the full frame rate.
Just to make things more interesting, I would also like the above two to be supported concurrently.
I've been reading deeper into the ESD User Guide and have looked at more of the examples and I'm beginning to think that your suggestion of using a primarily code-based approach is going to work best. I find the logic flow way of "coding" quite confusing without having a good grip on all the tricks that are no doubt there, but not so easy to find when scrolling the library tree.
All that I really need, I think, is a top level screen that has a menu button at top left. I want to touch that and have a panel grow (animated over a few hundred ms) to reveal half a dozen further menu buttons and maybe some checkboxes. I then want those revealed buttons to enable about 4 different views on the main page: two of those views I've already mentioned, the third is just an panel where I want to print some text and the 4th is a floating widget very much like a compact audio-recorder (stop/pause/play buttons+progress bar). If I can create the basic containers and this menu animation in ESD, then perhaps everything else can be done in pure C code as you've suggested?
I tried to adapt one of the examples to animate the transition from one page to another, as a crude attempt to achieve the animation mentioned above, but so far this isn't working. The Animation example using Actor generation uses a lot of logic to do what seems to me a really simple thing?
Thanks again and any further advice would be great.
*STOP PRESS* I just got a linear-layout with buttons opening in animated fashion! I guess that animated page transitions may not be supported, whereas to achieve the same using layouts is the right approach?..
Nick
Many thanks for your reply. I'm not sure how to upload pictures in order to show some example views that I'm aiming for, so I'll try to explain as briefly as I can.
My spectrogram data arrives at the GUI (software) as a vector of 128 pixel values - i.e. 128 different colour values, where this vector is updated at a rate of about 100 Hz. This is obviously faster than the supported frame rate, so my software will need to lower the rate, which I can do by grouping the data into chunks of 5 (columns) x 128 (rows) at 100/5 = 20 Hz. So the challenge is then to left-shift the current bitmap left by 5 columns, discarding the left-most 5 columns and filling the 5 right-most columns with my new data. The aim is a view that scrolls from right to left in real time. Given a width of 800 pixels and 100 columns per second, the view should hold 8 seconds of data at any instant. I have this working already on a very simple SPI display (128x240) using the ST7735 controller chip.
I have another type of view in which I'd like to update an entire bitmap, of roughly 256x256 pixels, at the full frame rate.
Just to make things more interesting, I would also like the above two to be supported concurrently.
I've been reading deeper into the ESD User Guide and have looked at more of the examples and I'm beginning to think that your suggestion of using a primarily code-based approach is going to work best. I find the logic flow way of "coding" quite confusing without having a good grip on all the tricks that are no doubt there, but not so easy to find when scrolling the library tree.
All that I really need, I think, is a top level screen that has a menu button at top left. I want to touch that and have a panel grow (animated over a few hundred ms) to reveal half a dozen further menu buttons and maybe some checkboxes. I then want those revealed buttons to enable about 4 different views on the main page: two of those views I've already mentioned, the third is just an panel where I want to print some text and the 4th is a floating widget very much like a compact audio-recorder (stop/pause/play buttons+progress bar). If I can create the basic containers and this menu animation in ESD, then perhaps everything else can be done in pure C code as you've suggested?
I tried to adapt one of the examples to animate the transition from one page to another, as a crude attempt to achieve the animation mentioned above, but so far this isn't working. The Animation example using Actor generation uses a lot of logic to do what seems to me a really simple thing?
Thanks again and any further advice would be great.
*STOP PRESS* I just got a linear-layout with buttons opening in animated fashion! I guess that animated page transitions may not be supported, whereas to achieve the same using layouts is the right approach?..
Nick