[RELEASED] Spiral SDK

Spiral SDK is a set of libraries for the Panda II that give you Windows/Pyxis2 like controls and enhanced abilities like streaming large images to the screen and working with transparencies.

Since you can’t emulate the Panda IIs screen natively in the VS Emulator, I’ve created a second library that gives the same interface calls as you’ll see in production but renders to the Emulator screen instead. It even has built in Thread.Sleep() funtions to better simulate the speed you’d actually see.

For those interested in an early look there’s a demo project here: [url]http://www.skewworks.com/downloads/netmf/SpiralDemo.zip[/url]

It’s an early demo so only the drawing methods used by controls are functional and a library for the actual Panda II will be up in the next few days.

As always if you have any suggestions/feedback/complaints I’m happy to hear them!

I have just tried it. Works great in emulator!

I know it is early but, wow already!

I want to eventually add support for Domino & Netduino Plus. So, since neither of these guys have what it takes to simply plop on a FEZ Touch, I ask…

What would you rather see supported?

Color LCD Shield
[url]http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9363[/url]
No touch screen, only 3 buttons, but cheap @ $39.95

OR

Touch Shield Slide
[url]http://www.liquidware.com/shop/show/TSL/TouchShield+Slide[/url]
The same LCD I used for Pyxis 1; has a touch screen and I can program functions on to it to make up for the Serial mode connection yuck.
Also expensive at $174.93.

OR

4D Systems 1.44" LCD Display Shield
[url]http://www.robotshop.com/4d-systems-1-44-lcd-display-shield-arduino-2.html[/url]
128 x 128 LCD + 5position stick

Spiral running on the Panda II w/ FEZ Touch

When do I get to try it? :wink:

I can always send GHI advance copies to tinker w. :wink:

Getting ready to release Spiral SDK so I thought I’d touch base w/ the community and see if there are any last-minute requests. :wink:

Available Controls
Checkbox, CommandButton, Form, Label, Listbox, Progressbar, RadioButton

Feature List
Font Creation Tool
Dynamically Load Fonts
Opaque and Transparent backed Text Drawing
Alpha-blended Rects
Ellipses, Lines, Rect
Full Touch-Screen Support
Ability to create Custom Controls
Render full screen images from uSD card
Thread safe rendering
Get/Set pixel
Image converter (with 24bit & indexed formats)
Full Backlight Control
Pyxis 2 style Modal windows

I’ve also split full screen rendering and Pyxis 2 modals into separate (but included) DLLs so you can save resources if you don’t use them.

[italic]Note:[/italic] It is a commercial app; but the few bucks charged include free revision upgrade and 1 free point upgrade. Screen orientation will be added shortly as a revision upgrade.

Do you have a form designer that turns a design into code?

Hey, that is an idea! I have used the form designer component in Visual Studio in other projects where I needed a form designer. It generates XML which could them be used to generate code. It could easily run within VS. This is totally doable!

I do not at present however this is a emulation DLL so you can run it over and over in the emulator without chewing up write cycles.

I’ll look into a form designer for the first revision release. Thanks for the idea! ;D

Very Nice :o

Question: ( I don’t have my Panda II and Fez Touch with me :-[ , for testing, it’s at my work 8) I can’t wait for monday, bloody week-end :wink: )

How you déclare your “DLL” for working with Fez Touch ? :-[

Because in your sample you declare the emulator with :

Emulation.ActiveForm = frmMain;

In your post you said: Feature List… but for me (French :slight_smile: ) it’s Futur list :wink: isn’t it ?

But I like this ;D And I hope see your first release soon :wink:

Sorry for my English and my questions, I’m newbie in FEZ products and C# Micro (but not in .NET but on PC…)

Flid,

The release version has 2 identical DLLs one called “Skewworks.Spiral” and one called “Skewworks.Spiral.Emulation”; both will call a static class named [italic]Graphics[/italic] (instead of Emulation as in the demo). To switch from testing to production you simply switch references from Skewworks.Spiral.Emulation to Skewworks.Spiral. All of your calls and code will immediately be ready to go on the device.

The production code is already done and I’m just updating the emulation DLL with a few new calls I added before writing up the documentation and releasing.

You should expect to see the release this weekend. So you won’t have to wait until Monday. :wink:

Spiral is now available for purchase for $12.99 here:[url] http://skewworks.com/products/Spiral[/url]

Nice work. Few questions…

  1. Does spiral have something for displaying bitmaps? I was thinking a way of converting images to a more native format for spiral then loading the native image from SD to display can be fast. Maybe an RLP.
  2. Is there some calibration for touch screen? Someone asked for it today.
  3. Does spiral use RLP?
  1. There’s a Font & Image converter included. I can add full Bitmap support if people end up wanting it.

  2. There isn’t but now that it’s brought up I will be sure to add it (I include full revision and point upgrades free)

  3. I spent a lot of time looking into RLP for Spiral. In fact every method has an RLP counterpart, but the overhead involved didn’t make sense to use it. The only place where it would really make sense is with the Alpha-blending but I haven’t managed to get the RLP version of ParallelPort read to work properly yet; though ParallelPort write worked immediately. Once I have that running I will replace Alpha-blending with RLP and possibly add a few other things like rotating, scaling, etc.

Is this supported? http://www.tinyclr.com/forum/2/3304/

This may be a silly question, but how do you download it? I just submitted payment, but I don’t see any instructions/links for downloading.

@ Peddy; there should have been a download link on the thank you page; I’ve sent you an email with your download link.

Not free :frowning: Sniff ???