Tag Archives: ProGFX

Product Preview – AVR Graphical LCD Development Board

To bring graphic LCD to the reach of every embedded system engineer we have developed a complete hardware and software suite that can be used to develop rich graphical application easily and quickly. More information on graphical programming with GLCD and AVR ATmega series MCU is discussed in the following articles. Part I – Introduction to GLCD and Hardware Setup Part II – Downloading and Installing ProGFX! Part III – Explains Graphic Primitive Functions. Part IV – Font and Text Handling Functions. The aim is to create a common hardware and software platform to create and share graphical applications. The user can concentrate only on application level, leaving the low level details handled by ProGFX. The advantage is that the end application can be easily shared among the user of ProGFX boards. The applications are more usable because any ProGFX programmer can easily understand the application logic (due to clean uniform api) and modify the application to suit their need. eXtreme Electronics, India will work towards releasing many open source ProGFX applications for their users. AVR Graphical LCD Development Board   AVR Graphical LCD Development Board     Product Features Out of the Box performance (Just bring it out and power up!) Step by step tutorial to learn Graphic Programming. Can be programmed by ISP Programmer. On board ATmega32A PU […]

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 III

Hello Friends, Welcome Back. This is the continuation of our tutorial series on Graphical LCD Programming. Till now we have made the hardware for testing and setup avr studio project for graphical development. Now as our hardware and software is ready, its time to get our hands dirty by digging deep into ProGFX graphical programming. Introduction The graphical LCD is made up of a grid of pixels. Common resolution is 128×64. That means that their are 64 horizontal lines and each line has 128 pixels. These displays are monochrome that means each pixel can either be ON or OFF. ON pixels looks dark while OFF pixels are nearly invisible. The glcd has a graphic RAM where each bit in ram corresponds to one pixel on screen. You write to the graphic RAM to modify its contents and the screen will change accordingly. The LCD module offers just that much functionality. You can’t do much with that. Pixel Matrix of Graphical LCD You need a graphic library that takes high level commands like Graphic primitives like line,circles, rectangle etc Text Drawing Image/Icon drawing. Double buffering. and changes the graphic memory accordingly. These operation requires some advance algorithms (at least from beginners point of view!). So the graphic library will help you generate complex graphical output very easily. Pixel Addressing The horizontal […]

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 […]

Using LCD Module with AVRs

When you start working with LCD modules you will start feeling the real power of MCU and your imaginations will be touching sky you will wonder how many exciting a powerful gadgets you can create and that’s so very easily. LCD Modules can present textual information to user. It’s like a cheap “monitor” that you can hook in all of your gadgets. They come in various types. The most popular one can display 2 lines of 16 characters. These can be easily interfaced to MCU’s, thanks to the API( Functions used to easily access the modules) we provide. LCD interfacing is just fun ! Fig: A 16×2 LCD Module Buy LCD Modules Online In India   PIN Configurations. The lcd modules has 16 PINs for interfacing. The details are given below. LCD Module Pin Configuration 1 VSS (GND Supply) 2 VCC (+5V) 3 VEE (Contrast Adjust) 4 RS 5 R/W 6 E 7 DB0 8 DB1 9 DB2 10 DB3 11 DB4 12 DB5 13 DB6 14 DB7 15 LED + 16 LED –   Connection with ATmega8/ATmega168 etc. The lcd module can be easily connected to the any 28 pin AVR MCU like ATmega8/ATmega168/ATmega328 etc. The diagram below shows the LCD connection with AVR MCUs port pins. Fig: Connection with 28 PIN AVR MCUs Connect the required pins of […]