BraveSirRobbin
Moderator
I have noticed CQC's fan base has been increasing lately!
WINCE solutions?
- Thread starter toymaster458
- Start date
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
I hadn't thought about it much, but actually almost everyone who has come on board recently (or who are seriously exploring) are coming from the HS or ML/HS worlds, looking for something either more flexible or more robust or both. But, given that most of the existing hard core DIY automation geek types would have often been in the HS camp due to lack of a real alternative, I guess it stands to reason this would happen. That's just where the bulk of the DIY market looking for this kind of product would have been.
I think that our 1.5 release kind of finally put us over some sort of hump in terms of amount of features in the box that people were looking for in an alternative, and a number of folks who were standing on the sidelines finally decided to take a look. And the 1.6 stuff fills in another big hole on the media management side.
See, you only have to sit in your bedroom and starve for 3 or 4 years to become an overnight success
I think that our 1.5 release kind of finally put us over some sort of hump in terms of amount of features in the box that people were looking for in an alternative, and a number of folks who were standing on the sidelines finally decided to take a look. And the 1.6 stuff fills in another big hole on the media management side.
See, you only have to sit in your bedroom and starve for 3 or 4 years to become an overnight success
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
BTW, I'm working on some new graphics for the Elk pads. This is in the form factor required, and just shows an assortment of the various bits that I've put together so far to go with this style background:
It's roughly based on some of the look of some of Ripper's stuff. I wanted to play around with that style and see what I could do. But it's also a quite neutral color scheme that should go well with most any style of decor.
It's roughly based on some of the look of some of Ripper's stuff. I wanted to play around with that style and see what I could do. But it's also a quite neutral color scheme that should go well with most any style of decor.
Just to clarify a few things..Dean will we load CQC viewer to the compact flash card and then it will communicate with the CQC server to grab our touchscreens we design?
*Also would it be possible to load that touchscreens graphics onto the CF instead of pulling them from the server? this might reduce lag a bit if there is any and instead we have the graphics right there on the CF and would only need to send the commands.
Also what sort of processor is in this? It is pricey but is a nice size and I'm thinking of possibly purchasing a test unit when they are available I would like to design one with the main Elk control as well as add in Weather, Russound, CD archive control and Security cam views pulled from a Axis webserver page.
Are there any limitations to what graphics can be displayed on these?..I am not fluent with WinCE architecture and I am just curious as to any limitations we might have if designing graphics for these...if these are pretty compatible with CQC and allow me to use any graphics I'll be grabbing one for tests when they are available.
I know there is some sort of restrictions when using your .net viewer and I think all buttons have to be placed on a background..thats not a problem...if so can I still create buttons states to show that buttons have been pressed or does it all have to be static when using the .net viewer?
*Also would it be possible to load that touchscreens graphics onto the CF instead of pulling them from the server? this might reduce lag a bit if there is any and instead we have the graphics right there on the CF and would only need to send the commands.
Also what sort of processor is in this? It is pricey but is a nice size and I'm thinking of possibly purchasing a test unit when they are available I would like to design one with the main Elk control as well as add in Weather, Russound, CD archive control and Security cam views pulled from a Axis webserver page.
Are there any limitations to what graphics can be displayed on these?..I am not fluent with WinCE architecture and I am just curious as to any limitations we might have if designing graphics for these...if these are pretty compatible with CQC and allow me to use any graphics I'll be grabbing one for tests when they are available.
I know there is some sort of restrictions when using your .net viewer and I think all buttons have to be placed on a background..thats not a problem...if so can I still create buttons states to show that buttons have been pressed or does it all have to be static when using the .net viewer?
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
I don't think there'll be a lot of issues with pulling them from the server, and it would make things far more flexible if you want to make changes. And we'd have to make a special version for getting them locally off the card as well, so unless there were serious issues we'd prefer not to go that route. If a PPC can handle pulling down images then I'm sure this guy can.
They do have on-board ROM on the device, but it's limited so you'd probably need to put our DNV on a card in order to leave room for future expansion of their own code.
The only major issue is lack of support for alpha blending in the compact framework. So, as mentioned above, you'll need to pre-draw the backgrounds with various buttons and such you want to use on a given screen, unless you are willing to do color based tranparency which requires a hard-edged blend. If you are using a flat color fill then you can just pre-do the buttons against that color of course and just capture some of the background around it and it'll blend in just fine. But if you want stuff like the image above, and like your stuff looks, then you'll have to draw them in.
You can though, by being clever about it, create pressed images for the buttons that only include the inner part. The inner part usually has a hard edge around it, so if you generate the pressed image with a background similar to the color surrounding the inner part of the button (often a black contrast color) and allow it to anti-alias so that the edge picks up some of that background, then you can do color based images for the pressed stuff and it looks ok. Since they only see it when the button is pressed, it makes less difference if the edge is a somewhat more ragged than it otherwise would be.
We used this scheme in Mark's PPC system (see the Palm Of Your Hand gallery on our web site.) We predraw all the backgrounds he needed with all the buttons in place, made sure the inner (glassy) part of the buttons had a reasonably hard edge (of gray in this case) and generated pressed versions of the glassy parts against a gray background with anti-aliasing. It works pretty nicely.
Oh, and the issue with pre-drawing the images into hte background isn't a DNV thing, it's a compact .Net Framework thing. If you run the DNV on a standard client that's running the non-compact version, it can do all the usual blending and such.
When the DNV asks for images, it tells the XML Gateway Server whether it can accept alpha or not. If not, then the server generates a color based transparency image on the fly from any alpha based images. So for things like the Weather Channel images, this lets the DNV display these images. They don't look nearly as nice, but they aren't too bad. But for the most part you'd want to avoid that, which you can do by just avoiding the use of any alpha based images as much as possible.
They do have on-board ROM on the device, but it's limited so you'd probably need to put our DNV on a card in order to leave room for future expansion of their own code.
The only major issue is lack of support for alpha blending in the compact framework. So, as mentioned above, you'll need to pre-draw the backgrounds with various buttons and such you want to use on a given screen, unless you are willing to do color based tranparency which requires a hard-edged blend. If you are using a flat color fill then you can just pre-do the buttons against that color of course and just capture some of the background around it and it'll blend in just fine. But if you want stuff like the image above, and like your stuff looks, then you'll have to draw them in.
You can though, by being clever about it, create pressed images for the buttons that only include the inner part. The inner part usually has a hard edge around it, so if you generate the pressed image with a background similar to the color surrounding the inner part of the button (often a black contrast color) and allow it to anti-alias so that the edge picks up some of that background, then you can do color based images for the pressed stuff and it looks ok. Since they only see it when the button is pressed, it makes less difference if the edge is a somewhat more ragged than it otherwise would be.
We used this scheme in Mark's PPC system (see the Palm Of Your Hand gallery on our web site.) We predraw all the backgrounds he needed with all the buttons in place, made sure the inner (glassy) part of the buttons had a reasonably hard edge (of gray in this case) and generated pressed versions of the glassy parts against a gray background with anti-aliasing. It works pretty nicely.
Oh, and the issue with pre-drawing the images into hte background isn't a DNV thing, it's a compact .Net Framework thing. If you run the DNV on a standard client that's running the non-compact version, it can do all the usual blending and such.
When the DNV asks for images, it tells the XML Gateway Server whether it can accept alpha or not. If not, then the server generates a color based transparency image on the fly from any alpha based images. So for things like the Weather Channel images, this lets the DNV display these images. They don't look nearly as nice, but they aren't too bad. But for the most part you'd want to avoid that, which you can do by just avoiding the use of any alpha based images as much as possible.
