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Hello,
I am Keil uVision user with MDK-pro licence. I am evaluating a few frameworks for a GUI development. One of them is natively supported by Keil - emWin libraries from Segger company. Unfortunatelly it looks too old-stylish for me and it is definitelly slower than other libraries. GUIbuilder also looks... very simple.
I have just noticed that Segger made an improvement within their GUI and they released AppWizard builder a few days ago with a new widgets that looks much better than before. My question: is it going to be included in Keil uVision MDK-pro version in the future? Because now I am dissapointed with the user experience from this GUI and don't know if stay with emWin or move to another framework.
Arek
Hello Arek,
As far as I know, MDK Professional still only includes a basic emWin package (a subset of the GUI software's features). You may try asking Segger/emWIn to trial out their more advanced software features. There are also other open source GUI's out there. I don't know how many have been tailored for armclang, though.
To be honest, there are realistic limits to how great looking a C/C++ graphic app can be, where you are normally limited by the RAM available in a microcontroller-based design. I've seen some really cool graphics features pulled off on Cortex-M7 boards, but that's peak performance as far as I know.
If it needs to look better than what an M7 can do, you may want to consider a hybrid design, with a Cortex-A and a Cortex-M multicore, where the Cortex-A can work out advanced graphics. This dramatically increases the number (and lowers cost) of available graphics software libraries to chose from (which might also save dev time). The Cortex-M can run simple tasks when the user isn't interacting with the screen. But I expect a dual core device to cost more.
What type of Cortex-M device were you planning to use?
Thanks,
Zack
Hi Zack,
Thank you for your response.
We are going to use M7 - specifically a STM32F746 microcontroller. It has nice hardware support for LCD things. Another GUI library I have tested not so long ago can acheive 60fps with almost no cpu load. Of course there is an external SDRAM and FLASH necessary for that purpose, but we can accept that if it can improve the customer UX. One thing is that we are going to make a medical device, this is why I am afraid about certifications and therefore I need a safe library with some doccumentation at least. I would like to stay with a MDK drivers/libraries and other staff, but this emWin gui builder (at least version included in MDK) doesnt appeal to me...
BTW, we have to operate the 1Mpx CMOS and make some image processing, this will be a good challange to accomplish that with such a microcontroller, so as many tasks as possible has to be performed by a hardware.
Have you considered the Qt framework for MCUs? https://www.qt.io/qt-for-mcus
Disclaimer: I haven't used Qt on an MCU, so I have no experience with using Qt with Keil. I have used it on embedded Linux, and it's very flexible and powerful. Worth a look, at least.