What companies are using these
products? |
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Steris medical ( www.steris.com)
replaced a mono vacuum fluorescent display
with an SLCD based display in a sterilizer unit. |
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Cepsa in Spain ( www.cepsa.es)
is using it for tank controllers and industrial
pumps. |
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What panels
does the SLCD support? |
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The SLCD directly supports the panels provided with
the SLCD evaluation kits. These include:
Passive color, 5.7”:
Hitachi SX14Q001, SX14Q001-ZZA, SX14Q004, SX14Q004-ZZA
(www.hedus.com/sales/lcdfeatured.asp)
Kyocera
KCG057QV1DC-G50
Lumex
LCM-S320240GCN-57
Passive color, 4.7”:
Kyocera
KCG047QV1AE-G00
Active color, 5.7”:
Hitachi TX14D11VM1CAA, TX14D11VM1CBA
Kyocera TCG057QV1AB-G00
Sharp LQ057Q3DC02
Active color, 5.5”:
NEC NL3224BC35-20 |
Can the
SLCD support other panels? |
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With the appropriate cable adapter, the SLCD can
support other panels that have the following characteristics:
- On-board DC-DC converter (Panel only needs a single
power supply, either 3,3V or 5V)
- Contrast controlled by resistance or voltage,
no greater than panel power supply
- Maximum panel size is HVGA (640x240) at 16 colors.
No practical minimum size.
The cable adapter in general must be customer supplied
unless Reach plans to support the panel in an evaluation
kit. |
What is
the price of the SLCD board? |
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Please contact Reach sales for pricing. 503-675-6464. |
I need a different sized font(s)
than are described in the manual. How can I get them? |
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Fonts are stored as BMP files in the on-board microcontroller
flash memory. If you specify the font, size in points,
and attributes (bold, italic, etc), then Reach will add
them in for you. |
How do I decide what panel to
use? |
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The choice of panel generally comes down to price vs.
optical performance. At the low end, the CSTN (Color Super
Twisted Nematic) “passive” panels are the
least expensive, but offer the lowest brightness, color
fidelity, and response time. At the high end, a TFT (Thin
Film Transistor) display offers the same crispness of
a desktop LCD monitor, with higher brightness. Operating
temperature ranges, and viewing angle also differ between
panels. Finally, the availability of a panel is important. |
My end product will have a 5-7
year lifetime. Will the SLCD board be supported for
that long? |
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Reach Technology Inc. was incorporated in 1988 and is
still supporting products designed in the mid 1990’s – over
7 years ago. As long as there are customers for a particular
board, and parts are available, we will continue to make
it. It is our job to keep the product current and deal
with part obsolescence issues. The user interface will
stay the same. |
What graphics controller do
you use on the board? |
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The graphics controller is the Epson S1D13705. It has
an embedded 80KB frame buffer. |
Please explain the color mapping. |
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The board has an 80KB frame buffer. This provides
for 8 bit per-pixel color at 320 x 240 resolution. In
order to support a consistent color image with multiple
on-screen bitmaps, a constant color palette is used.
The palette maps the 8 bit pixel index to the 12 bit
color value sent to the panel.
The palette provides 16 gray scales (including black
and white) and 6 color values for each of red, green,
and blue. This totals 6*6*6*16 = 231 colors (actually
only 230 because of black redundancy).
In 24 bit RGB terms, the colors supported are as
follows:
R, G, B = independently either 0x00, 0x33, 0x66,
0x99, 0xCC or 0xFF (six colors)
R=G=B = 0x00, 0x11, 0x22, …0xEE, 0xFF (16 grays)
A file ps8666.act is provided that contains the Adobe
Photoshop palette corresponding to this color mapping. |
Please explain how a 24 bit
palletized image is displayed. |
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When is 24 bit “exact” palletized image
is download to the SLCD and displayed, the bitmap routine
maps the desired color to the closest available in the
fixed SLCD palette. |
How can I speed up the display
of a stored bitmap? |
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If the bitmap is palletized using the SLCD palette, the BMPload program
does not store the palette in flash memory, and on-the-fly color translation
is not needed. This speeds up the display. |
Why does the BMPload program
display the full path and file name? |
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This is done so that files in different directories
can be loaded. It makes the display hard to read, but
it positively identifies the location of each bitmap file. |
How many bitmaps can I store in the on-board flash memory? |
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Bitmaps are RLE compressed for storage. To see the effect of compression on a particular image, download the BMPload program from here, and run it. Ignore the initial error (no SLCD attached) and add a bitmap. Then click on the bitmap name, and the information on the right hand side will show the compressed size. Note that if the bitmap is palletized using the the SLCD palette, the 768 bytes of palette data does not need to be stored in the flash memory. |
How many times can the flash memory containing the bitmaps and macros be rewritten? |
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The flash memory has 25 year (!) data retention and 1,000,000 write/erase cycle durability. |
I want to place a bitmap over the screen content, like a transparent GIF. Another way of saying this is that I'd like a non-rectangular bitmap. How can I do this? |
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At present there is no transparency option available. One thing that might work is to split the image into a series of rectangular ones - for example an arrow could be made from a rectangle and an arrowhead. This way the stem of the arrow will not obscure the background image as much as if the entire arrow hade been one rectangular bitmap. |
I'm drawing a full screen bitmap and using hotspots within it for control. The hotspots invoke macros. The macros redraw the screen. When I touch a hotspot, the new screen's colors are wrong. What's happening and how do I get around this? |
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What's happening is a side effect of how normal hotspots work. A standard hotspot defined by the "x" command specifies a touch-active area. When the area is touched, the screen is reverse imaged (foreground becomes background and vice versa) to provide visual feedback of the touch. When the button invokes a macro that redraws the screen, the screen is drawn while the button is pushed and the foreground / background colors are reversed. Then when the button is released, the hotspot is reversed even though the underlying image has changed.
The solution is to use the "xs" command that does not change the screen when the defined hotspot is touched. Either the new screen will provide visual feedback, or the macro can do its own reverse imaging. |
I want to invoke a macro when a button is released as well as when it is pushed. How do I do this? |
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Version 2.1.7 and above software provides this feature. Contact Reach for an upgrade. |
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