Growing family of EVE graphic chips (embedded video engine) brought and is still bringing a significant simplification of applications with a graphic design to the market. It is not just the graphic output but also interactive (HMI) applications, as the usage of touch panels is also possible.
This time, we don´t want to go into technical details of given chips but rather bring you information about software environment for development (IDE) in which it´s possible to intuitively-visually compose practically whole application and generate the code for the given EVE chip variant.
Latest IDE from company Bridgetek (created by FTDI) called EVE Screen Designer (ESD) 3.x truly brings quite a lot.
We can say that in the intuitive graphic environment it´s possible to build the whole application without detailed knowledge of the FT90x or FT81x chips. Of course, editing generated code (ANSI C) is always possible.
Do you remember how you learned at school to calculate operating point of thetransistor, to design a reliable feedback loop in amplifier or how to create a current source from discrete components? Maybe you´ll recall the beautiful basics of analogue technology, based on which many integrated circuits and modules are built up. But the fact is that thanks to the availability of cheap integrated circuits and modules, it´s no longer necessary for everyone to know full operation details of a given component.
Naturally, such knowledge is always beneficial and probably specialists in the subject matter will still be needed for yet a long time (who else would design integrated circuits?). But by this example I wanted to show that similarly even at creation of graphic interface you no longer have to be a brilliant SW engineer with detailed knowledge of a given graphic chip.
Similar situation applies forIDE for HMI design. ESD 3.x functions as “WYSIWYG“ (what you see is what you get) thus all that is necessary is to use ready-to-use components (“widgets“) without laborious creation of them.
Thanks to visual SW tools such as ESD 3.x, it´s possible to focus on “what we want to reach” without long and demanding study of “how to make it”.
Perhaps several videos - “tutorials“ from company Bridgetek will give you the best idea.
ESD 3.x is free SW, easy to download from Bridgetek web pages .
In case of interest in any grafic chips or modules form company Bridgetek, please contact us at sales@soselectronic.com.
- visual development environment for graphic interface development
- whole design up to code generation is in visual environment without necessity of programming
- possibility of designed project simulation (live preview)
- many ready-to-use components of higher level (widgets)
- many sample projects
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