Ft. Gratiot Firm Part Of New GUI Toolkit
Ft. Gratiot-based Blue Water Embedded, a supplier of graphics software for embedded systems, and San Diego, Calif.-based Express Logic Inc., a provider of royalty-free real-time operating systems, Tuesday announced the availability of the PrismX graphics toolkit for the STMicroelectronics STM32 processor family.
PrismX, a complete GUI software development system for resource-constrained devices such as STMicroelectronics Cortex-M3-based STM32, delivers the eye-catching graphical capabilities and time-to-market edge needed for medical, industrial, office automation and consumer markets where user interfaces play an essential role in device design.
PrismX represents a ThreadX RTOS-integrated port of Blue Water Embedded's Prism technology that is marketed and supported by Express Logic.
PrismX is comprised of the PrismX Runtime Framework, a full-featured GUI toolkit, PrismX Micro, a GUI toolkit for monochrome to 8-bit color-depth targets, and PrismX Insight, a desktop GUI design and resource editing tool. Integrated to take advantage of STM32's capabilities, PrismX delivers a high-performance graphical drawing library and a GUI widget set for this platform.
"Today's customers want high-end interfaces regardless what device they're using; they've come to expect it," said William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. "Companies therefore strive to put advanced user interfaces on new generation low-power and resource-constrained processors. Together, ThreadX and PrismX provide an elegant solution for incorporating advanced UI appearance using the onboard RAM and flash of STM32 devices."
Demonstrations of the PrismX GUI design package on an STM32F10C system are available online at www.rtos.com/downloads/threadx_demo/ and can be viewed live March 1-3 in the Express Logic booth at Embedded World 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany.
The demonstration involves a simple media player application using many PrismX features including gradient-filled 3D buttons, anti-aliased fonts, screen transition animations, and scrolling lists.
The STM32's limited onboard RAM requires that PrismX execute without a traditional graphics frame buffer. To work around this, all drawing operations cause immediate updates to external GRAM memory of the LCD.
"With companies requiring graphics on some of the most resource-constrained architectures, this minimalist RAM requirement is central to the design of the PrismX framework and allows us to operate where others cannot," said Ken Maxwell, president of Blue Water Embedded. "The PrismX framework can also be configured to stream graphics assets directly from external serial flash devices, further reducing the need for onboard nonvolatile storage."
The PrismX development platform, PrismX Insight, offers a large range of data output formats such as C++ source code, XML screen description files, and binary resource files, enabling developers to tailor output to the requirements and capabilities of target systems.
PrismX for the STM32F10C is available in full source code form, royalty free, at license prices starting at $9,500.
Blue Water Embedded provides graphics development software for high-performance user interfaces in embedded devices. Blue Water Embedded brings a team of engineers together who boast decades of experience delivering quality graphical software. Blue Water Embedded is committed to quality and customer service, making it the software partner of choice for companies creating devices for medical, consumer, security, telematics, and industrial applications.
More at www.bwembedded.com.
