[En-Nut-Discussion] New displays, chained devices, best way or how to

[Thiago A. Corrêa]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ulrich Prinz <uprinz2 at netscape.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> New display types:
> I am implementing a graphical display. I am trying to keep as close to
> the LCD structures as I can, but those code ist mostly character
> oriented. A graphical display, especially one without own fonts, is
> pixel oriented. The LCD code is attached to the term.c what would be
> great for the graphical display to. But there are some new commands
> needed to use all the features a graphical display features.
> So, did already someone solve that and has some code where I can jump
> into? Or are there comments how to do that the best way?

   That's an interesting topic. Harald has expressed interest in a
"GUI API" for graphic displays, but AFAIK, nothing has been designed
yet.
   He did mention that he didn't want a simple primitives lib with
lines and boxes, but something more elaborated.

   Perhaps you could open up an entry on the wiki to discuss your
proposed implementation?
   Contiki has an GUI API, we should take a look at how they do it.

> Chaining Devices:
> The displays I am trying to attach are SPI displays. So I need to
> register a new device for the SPI bus. Then I need to register a new
> stream device attached to the spi device from before. Is there an
> optimal way to do this? Actually I do the NutRegisterSPIDevice and then
> I do a NutRegisterDevice. But I think the registration of the display
> device itself should keep care for registering itself on the SPI bus in
> its init routines.

The reason for the NutRegister*Device in app code is to make it easy
for the linker to axe unused code.

> At all I really miss some guides of how to do some thing inside nutos
> the best way. Is there any further documentation available?

There is the wiki, the main website and the mailling list. Feel free
to post your specific problems, perhaps some of us can be of
assistance.

> Ah, I develop these nutos drivers under linux but will backport them to
> the windows release for shure and share them to the community. But  I
> have massive problems getting the GUI going of the nutos configurator
> under linux. Any comments for that too?

I had issues too, with the autotools. I couldn't generate the Makefile
under Gentoo. It just can't find lua files, don't know about others.
Is that the same problem you are having?

Kind Regards,
   Thiago A. Correa