Prebuilt demos available for most popular platforms

[Guest Michal Chodzikiewicz]

Hi,

I am very interested in your library, it seems to suit my needs for new project at my company.

I would be more than happy to find prebuilt binaries for most popular platforms (In my case STM32F746G-DISCO), just to try it without installing any additional tools / need to struggle to make it work in your environment.

Also example projects for most popular IDE's would be great, since as far as I can see libraries depends on a bit advanced makefile magic.

I am aware, that adding features to library itself seems far more interesting for open-source community, but improving first impression by providing better guides / ready-made examples can boost your growth by reasonable factor.

 

Best Regards

Michał Chodzikiewicz

[inmarket]

Thankyou Michal for your feedback and welcome to the community. 

There are some example projects in the downloads section but more would definitely be nice.

The real issue for us is purely man power. There is still a lot we want to do with uGFX and we simply don't have enough time as it is. Also a danger with example projects is that they can get out of date. Maintaining them can be an issue. As an example I am currently working on some changes for upcoming uGFX v3. Those changes mean every example application in the uGFX source directory plus every driver needs to be updated and tested. This job alone is probably a couple of man weeks of work and uGFX v3 is not even close to ready yet. Then there is the multi-platform testing involved with the new release itself.

I would love for someone in the community to take your suggestion up as a task and commit to providing and maintaining example projects (and possibly some binaries) for us. We are also looking for someone to provide help with the wiki and other documentation.

Any help is appreciated.  

[chodzikman]

Seems like I feel invited

Looks like a job for continious integration system like Jenkins

New lib release -> rebuilding (and /or remaking IDE templates for) all examples -> tickets for testing -> new examples release

At the moment I am implementing similar behavior of our company repository code (not a huge company, ), so in future I may share my experience if you want to.

What I actually meant in first post is that you have examples for some boards but as source + makefile, at work it is not certain that you can fulfill i.e toolchain dependencies in few minutes for multiple reasons.  Therefore running automated make and binary upload of this demos shouldn't be a problem and since ST-Link2.1 has drag and drop behavior you can test this demo on your discovery board 5 minutes after googling this library.

Cheers!

[inmarket]

Yes, please do share your experience. 

The suggestions you have are good. I will look at what we can do with binaries for uGFX v3. Perhaps we will select one or two platforms as our "binary" platforms.

Perhaps Win32 and STM429I-DISCOVERY?

The reason I picked Win32 is so people can run a demo with no hardware and is the most commonly used dev environment. The reason I picked the STM429I-DISCOVERY is because it is cheap, common, and uses STM32 chips which currently seem to be the most commonly used range of cpus in the community. 

Comments anyone?

[chodzikman]

I think it is a neat start.

Perhaps F746DISCOVERY is also desirable due to capacitive touch and most popular size of screen, but if you want to stick with 2 platforms, I think F429 cuts the mustard.

Thank you for considering my comments

 

[inmarket]

Personally I like the F769 board better too. The reason I suggested the F429 instead is that it is more middle of the range in computing power and accessories. The F769 is one of the faster processors in the range and therefore not as indicative of a "standard" project. I will check pricing however because if the F769is cheaper that may swing me in the other direction. 

Any thoughts?

Joel, what do you think too?

[Joel Bodenmann]

I agree that we definitely need more demos and also pre-build ones. As mentioned, it solely fails on man power. I do have some more advanced demos ready for publishing as well such as a GUI for a coffee maker that we often use for demonstration purposes. I should clean it up and publish it.

We'd appreciate any additional man-power on this.

[chodzikman]

Attached is template project for Eclipse for F746 discovery (4,3" cap-touch screen) based on make template project from downloads.

It was created in Neon.3 CDT version with GNU ARM Eclipse Plugin (no vendor-dependent plugins). Should be added to workspace using Import feature.

Works out of box on my machines, including debug features. Due to some search path problems with static code analysis errors and messages are based entirely on GCC output after build (static analysis disabled). When I will find some time, I will try to write some description how I have done it.

Please let me know in case of any problems or just that it works properly.

f746_downloaded_make_eclipse.zip

[Joel Bodenmann]

This is great, thank you very much for sharing!

Unfortunately I don't have any time the next couple of days/weeks to give this an in-depth look. Do you feel like it's ready enough so we can just put it straight into the downloads section?

[chodzikman]

I wanted to check it one more time (also I have figured out problem with Indexer), and suddenly magic smoke escaped from my board due to ESD

I am going to receive new one in few days, and will let you know then, ok?

BTW I also had some questions regarding more advanced stuff in library, but in this case I need to pass until I will get new one

[Joel Bodenmann]

Sorry to hear about that... luckily it's just hardware that can be replaced - still a bummer though  
Definitely waiting for your feedback / response then once you get your hardware.

Feel free to create a new forum topic for your question(s) at any point. We're happy to answer any questions we can.