Tag Archives: lib

Handling Text and Fonts in Graphic LCD

ProGFX supports advance function to draw text on graphical LCD screen. ProGFX support multiple fonts, fonts with variable width characters, absolute pixel based positioning, and utility function to get the dimension of text in any specified font. The last feature is used to cleanly position text relative to other graphic and text objects on screen. So lets get started. First you will need a tool that will help convert any Windows Font to ProGFX compatible format. Thanks to Mr. F. Maximilian Thiele we have a great tool called Font Creator. You can download it from here. Download GLCD Font Creator It is a Java application so you need the Java Runtime to use it. Launch the app using start.bat file. You will get a screen similar to this. Font Creator Main Screen From file menu select "New Font" , and configure the New Font Dialog as follows. New Font Dialog Name = Arial12 Import Font = Arial Size =12 And click ok. From Export Menu Select "Export Font", Give it the name "Arial12.h" while saving. Create a Atmel Studio Project with GFX Support. The steps are given in the following tutorials. Hello World Project with Atmel Studio 6. Setting up ProGFX Project using AVR Studio. Name the AVR Studio Project as "FontDemo". Open the project folder in Windows Explorer (or […]

Interfacing Graphical LCD with AVR MCU – Part II

This tutorial deals with downloading and installing ProGFX graphic engine. ProGFX is a free and easy to use embedded graphic library that can control several display modules and can run on AVR, PIC and ARM MCUs. In this tutorial we will make a ProGFX graphical application with Atmel AVR ATmega32 MCU using AVR Studio and WinAVR (C Compiler). So lets begin. Downloading ProGFX engine. Please download the ProGFX engine from the following link. Download ProGFX v1.0 Installing ProGFX Engine. You need WinZIP to extract the files to your hard disk. Please extract it to root of any drive like "C:". Following Folders will be created. C:\progfx\include C:\progfx\lib Folders Created after extracting the ProGFX package Note that core of the engine is contained in two folders named "include" and "lib" but there may be some others folders too, like "Help" depending on your version of ProGFX engine. Creating a Graphical Project using AVR Studio. The basic tools required for developing with AVRs are Atmel Studio (Integrated development environment with integrated C compiler) eXtreme Burner AVR (to transfer program files to chip) These tools must be installed and set up correctly as described in the following tutorial. Creating "Hello World" project with Atmel AVR. Start AVR Studio and you will be presented with the following screen. Atmel Studio 6 Startup Screen The […]

Interfacing KS0108 based 128×64 Graphical LCD with AVR MCU.

Those how are building microcontroller based project for little long must have got bored with the good old character LCDs. Whether you are bored or your application require to present more data to the user in a better way, you need Graphic LCD. Character LCD Interfacing is quite easy so every one uses it, but when I comes to Graphic LCD you need a well written and powerful graphic library. Its not enough that you read the LCD datasheet and connect it your MCU and start sending data. Because the LCD just appears to be block of memory whose contents are directly visible on screen. The datasheet can only guide you how to access this memory. You just can’t do much by writing to the memory. The graphic library is a piece of software that has complex algorithms to render graphic primitives like line, rectangles, circles, images and more. It also helps load fonts and render text and numbers on screen. So it provide high level access to the LCD screen and applications can be written much more easily. While I was researching for graphic library for the GLCDs, I found some but I was not fully satisfied by any of them. So I began to write a clean, powerful, portable and easy to use library that can handle sever […]