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PanelSoft User Interfaces and Usability for Embedded Systems |
Feedback to "Color By Numbers"- Murphy's Law, January 2003Read the original artilce at Color By Numbers Further comment on Palm from your author: The article mentions that Palm got bad press over thier marketing departments lying tactics with the M130. Palm offered to refund to disgruntled customers. It is probably a fairly extreme response to something that makes little practical difference to the functioning of the device for its typical user, but it is a fitting punishment for dishonest marketing. The very fact that so few consumers understand the real meaning of the number of colors and techniques such as dithering is exactly why the standards of honesty in marketing these types of devices needs to be high. Palms refund offer may be a bit disingenuous. Their web site requests you to enter your details, and that they will contact you 'soon'. Like many who have complained in the newsgroups, I have heard nothing. They seem to be offering a refund for PR purposes, but in practice they are, at the very least, dragging their feet. It is a shame to be knocking Palm, a company that has produced many impressive products in the past, but I am a firm believer that reckless marketing should always be punished, so that we can have some hope of believing advertisements in the future. Now back to mails from readers: Quote: "I still hope to find a good candidate for a cheap platform for embedded graphics work. If I ever do, I'll let you know. And if you try it with more luck than I had, I expect you to reciprocate. "The Charmed Labs Xport 2.0 and Nintendo GBA combination is quite good especially now with the GBA SP with the on board lighting. I think you will find the system relatively cheap, good quality and easy to program. You get to play with an built in FPGA, plus you can play and/or code games on it. A friend of mine and I both have the system and we have been doing a few side projects for fun. http://www.charmedlabs.com/xport.htmDavid Galloway
Niall, In reference to you cheap eval board, you should look into other Palm devices that do have flash (I'm sure you've already gotten some emails about this). The m500, m515, and i705 all have flash ROM and run a Motorola CPU. The new Tungsten T also has flash but runs an ARM. So, the cheapest eval board you can get would be $149 w/o color(m500) or $299(after a rebate) w/ color(m515); as an added benefit you get twice the RAM over the m130(or m500) with the m515. Just an FYI. By the way, I really like your articles and look forward to Mr. Ganssle's and your contributions to the magazine. Regards, Niall, I just read your article about trying (unsuccessfully) to use an m130 as an inexpensive evaluation board and thought I'd offer a few quick thoughts. You mentioned that you can't run from RAM because the interrupt handlers are still fixed in ROM, which is not flashable. Why not just prototype your application as a Palm OS .prc, run it from RAM, and (when running) completely take over the device after your application is launched? The processor runs in supervisor mode, so you can easily turn off interrupts, replace low memory exception (and hardware interrupt) vectors, re-configure the hardware as you wish including disabling memory protection, etc. and the device is yours to do with as you wish. When you're done, you can either hit the reset button on the back or jump back into the reset vector in ROM to reboot the device. Of course, doing any of this requires intimate knowledge of the hardware and/or at least the processor, but that information is available and if you were considering buying a Motorola Dragonball evaluation board in the first place (as you mentioned) then this shouldn't be a problem. The nice thing about this is that (depending on your exact needs) you get a development platform that comes in a nice pretty demo-able package instead of a big ugly development board. Something else you might be interested in is the Palm OS Emulator. It is an open source 68K emulator that emulates most Palm OS Devices on the desktop, talks to various debugging tools (Metrowerks CodeWarrior, PalmDebugger, gdb, etc.), and runs on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. You might find it helpful in (a) figuring out how various device hardware works, and (b) re-using to create a customized emulator for your own embedded projects. --Steve Hi, Just read your Color by Numbers article. Have you considered using the Nintendo GameBoy Advance as a GUI platform? The screen is very good, it is cheap, and in March there will be a new version with a lit display as well. There are lots of programming resources on the web. Best regards, This is an extract from a mail from Alex O'Donnell, which describes a useful trick that I had not come across elsewhe: Niall's bit I am a bit confused by your reference to overlaying planes - some hardware >supprts this, but from the context I am wondering if you are refering to >some trick with the color map to achieve this. If there is one I am not familiar with it. Alex's response It's a technique I learnt at collage (Manchester Polytechnic), and only used a couple of times in radar and mapping applications. I was working on an Arm2 (Acorn A3000) based portable radar display, we had 256 colour mode. We set up the palette so we had 4 bits for Radar image, a bit for the text plane, a bit for cursors and a bit for map info. We maintained the polar scan image in the video buffer, updating live, this gave us smoother sweep than buffered video mode. Each pixel in the radar image under went a read modify write, ANDing to preserve text and icons, ORing to set this sweeps radar image. Disabling graphics or text then simply became a matter of changing the colour map. Moving a cursor simply a case of XORing the bits involved. As you can see we were down to 16 colours radar image, and three graphics colours, but the savings in RAM and imaging processing time were tremendous. So there we were, faking hardware overlays with software. I guess most people have more fire power and memory, and can get away without such techniques now. Strange what's happened in the last 10 years. Alex
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