Graphics library for embedded systems without Linux? [closed]

Answer 1

512kb is small. Good luck!

You might want to try a dsl combined with mplayer. The latter does not need a GUI to display a movie. I guess it could also display images.

Nonetheless I fear it will be too much for your flash. Maybe the source of these links will help.

Answer 2

You probably need to compress fonts using Run Length Encoding (RLE). See the .pcx file format for examples, although it's probably best to design a custom RLE. You didn't specify the bit depth of the LCD, but fonts need either one bit per pixel if antialiasing isn't needed, or a maximum of three BPP with antialiasing. Every character has to have it's own width because monospaced text is not nice. You should render directly from the RLE compressed font to the screen, using an optimized routine.

SDL is a very portable graphics libary. It's used in embedded Linux systems, but I think it can be used without an OS. The nice thing about SDL is that you can use Windows / Linux to develop and test your UI, and later target your embedded system. No changes to application code needed!

You could also use the Anti-Grain Geometry library (http://www.antigrain.com/about/index.html) on top of SDL. With a 16 or 24 bit LCD it produces stunning graphics. It might be just a bit too large for your environment, because my executable on a ARM/Linux system was about one megabyte. It contained SDL, AGG and libfreetype2 for font rendering. AGG is also a little slow, but produces beautiful results.

Answer 3

We have used "PEG", the C++ version, from Swellsoftware for many years. It is commercial software, not free, but the underlying screen driver can use just a pointer to graphics memory and they provide many sample drivers for different types of graphics hardware. We wrote our own custom driver(s) for our proprietary hardware, using the sample drivers as reference. We have always had some sort of RTOS, but I believe PEG+ can also operate without an OS.

Check it out here: http://www.swellsoftware.com/

good luck,

Answer 4

Not free, but good on low resource systems: http://www.tat.se and their products Kastor and Cascades. It only requires a pointer to video memory, malloc and something that looks like a file system. The last two requirements are not absolutely necessary either. No operating system is required.

Answer 5

If your requirements for interactivity and GUI widgets are very modest (or you're OK with designing your own widgets), have a look at LibGD. Draw the image you want to appear on the screen using the library's functions, and then write it to the frame buffer using gdImagePngToSink().

Answer 6

(old question, but I wanted to post my findings on the subject)

For high-quality graphics, Anti-Grain Geometry is a good choice. It compiles to about 50kB and can be customized to write into all kinds of framebuffers and rendering devices: http://www.antigrain.com/

For user interface, Gwen appears a good choice. It is easily portable and can be customized to render either bitmap skinned controls or just rectangle/circle/line forms: https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN

Then if you are also selecting an RTOS, NuttX has it's own graphics subsystem and widget toolkit: http://nuttx.sourceforge.net/