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Overcoming Obstacles for Developing Exceptional Embedded User Interfaces
Nik Schultz - Crank Software - Watch Now - EOC 2021 - Duration: 26:34
The route to developing exceptional user interfaces (UI) is often not a straight one. Nearly all projects encounter detours (prototyping, testing, and design changes) that can often derail the project.
Historically, changes at the design level resulted in teams needing to hunt for and replace all changed assets manually. This would result in changes being missed, coded behavior being lost and ultimately, poor UX.
Join Crank Software, leaders in embedded GUI development, to learn how to streamline design changes and develop embedded GUI applications that provide outstanding user experiences while getting to market on a tight deadline.
Absolutely, the majority of our supported MCU platforms on top of FreeRTOS. That being said we also support other RTOS's (Azure, MQX etc..)
When it comes to embedded systems and the storyboard, is there any concern for memory if you add more functionality and/or buttons and whether or not the added items will "fit"?
Great question and the answer is yes, always :)
Storyboard provides a metrics view that helps you view the current resource consumption of your UI design. The metrics view shows the breakdown between what would be filesystem or flash storage vs RAM so you know if the current version of your UI will fit on your hardware.
I fully agree to the prior comments, the demo looks nice but how to bring the UI to real hardware and connect it? And is this approach only applicable for systems like the iMX Platform where you have an underlying embedded linux or can you tailor down th UI to bare metal systems too?
Hi Erwin,
Please see some of the responses I've included to other comments. Storyboard is a scalable solution and will run on MPU systems down to MCU systems. We have many of customers shipping products on popular MCU solutions from vendors like NXP(RT10XX, K70, etc..), ST(STM32F4, STM32H7, etc..) bare metal is always a conversation(in most cases yes), some customers provide their own OS abstraction layers, and others simply leverage an RTOS.
Nice demos, but I missed seeing how do you connect the nice GUI with the embedded code, something like FreeRTOS or similar....
Very reasonable comment, I kept this talk more focused on design constraints but the following links should shed some light on this.
https://support.cranksoftware.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056943612-Exporting-and-Running-on-your-Embedded-Target
https://support.cranksoftware.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056943692-Sending-and-Receiving-Data-with-Storyboard-IO
There are a few technical differences(task vs process) between RTOS's and an OS like Linux but the same principles apply in regards to sending events with data.
Is there any open source alternative similar to Storyboard?
I'm not sure if there are open source alternatives that are very similar to Storyboard given that we are Design tooling built around a runtime engine. Generally the open-source versions are code libraries.
What would happen if you click the thermostat button on the thermostat screen? Would it also go left or do nothing?
Great question, If you trigger a screen transition to a screen that you are currently on the transition will be ignored, so in this case nothing.
Storyboard seems great for Mockups and fast prototyping but is there any way to export the GUI and interactions and integrate easily into embedded Linux code? How do you integrate this with the backend?
Thank you for the question. You can absolutely export your application for integration in embedded applications(pretty much any OS/RTOS, not just Linux) I'm going to include some links to resources that describe this scenario since you could choose a few different options. As for integrating to your backend, we provide an IPC library (C) that allows you to send/receive events with data. So you can create custom events to trigger actions specific to your application. In the context of this video imagine a "TemperatureUpdate" event with the current temperature as data.
Hi Nik... Storyboard can include into a AWS FreeRTOS deployment? FreeRTOS use a C language... Is possible integrate it using a LED or LCD screens? Thanks