Software accelerates and demonstrates display design ideas
Developed by Itron (UK), the iDevOS software is engineered to accelerate the speed of display development and allows customer demonstrations to be created in a matter of hours to provide proof of concept.
Customers can download operating screen images and code for keyboards, interface setup, graphs, menus and animations to plug directly into their application.
There is also the ability to create and upload a library of fonts and images in jpg, bmp or png file formats to the 128M/4Gbyte of onboard storage.
The iDevOS script-based programming language has commands like text, draw, img, load and setup which makes it accessible to hardware design engineers as well as experienced C++ programmers. Depending on context, the 32 core commands expand up to 300 functional operations. The real time OS allows new functions and structures to be created on-the-fly if required.
The ‘free to download’ iDevTFT development suite runs on a Windows PC and provides project control, font editing, program development, syntax checking and full debug. The built-in real time syntax check and debug saves hours of development time, says Itron (UK), allowing the company to analyse customer submitted programs when help is required. Users can copy their code to an SD card and plug it in or upload to the display via a USB.
Several customers have transferred their complete application onto the iDevOS hardware/software platform as display modules evolved into modular PLCs with isolated digital interfaces, PT100 and thermocouple inputs and pulse width modulation (PWM) motor drive outputs. Itron (UK) also supplies embedded Linux display modules for those applications already written in C/C++.
