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TV Display - Great, but difficult to do much work in the space that's left — Parallax Forums

TV Display - Great, but difficult to do much work in the space that's left

mike101videomike101video Posts: 43
edited 2006-06-16 19:25 in Propeller 1
I am building a video controller for my (professional) Sony video cameras. ( Using a motorized Pan/Tilt head, with ELM Lanc chips to control the camera functions.) I have Javelin chips controlling the pan/tilt-camera LANC (which I will change to Propeller - should be able to put the LANC contoller in a COG), but for now, I really would like to use the Propeller as the user interface. ( I have LCD TV's coming out of my ears......... tongue.gif )

Started building a simple UI, with buttons, with text on each, but quickly run out of space in memory. The double buffered bitmaps really eat it up.

Any suggestions, thoughts, etc on how to make the TV display more useful,
Thx,
Mike

Comments

  • Mike CookMike Cook Posts: 829
    edited 2006-06-16 13:37
    If you just need text, check out this post:

    http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=587524



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    Mike
  • Mike GreenMike Green Posts: 23,101
    edited 2006-06-16 13:37
    Can you switch to using a text-based TV object with the button outlines made with special characters (look at the Propeller Font)? That would save a lot of memory.
  • mike101videomike101video Posts: 43
    edited 2006-06-16 15:44
    Thanks - hadn't seen that posting - will try going that way.
  • cgraceycgracey Posts: 14,206
    edited 2006-06-16 19:25
    Yeah, double-buffered bitmaps eat up RAM fast. If you really want a bitmap, you don't need to double-buffer it. That's just for high-speed full screen graphics where graphics are everything to the application.

    Those efficient text displays will cut your video RAM needs by 90%! If text is okay, that's the way to go. Also, you can make your own character definitions for buttons and the like. The only caveat is that they must be placed at 64-byte boundaries so that the 10-bit field in the word which defines the character and color in screen memory can be shift left 6 bits to get the base of the cell definition.
    mike101video said...
    I am building a video controller for my (professional) Sony video cameras. ( Using a motorized Pan/Tilt head, with ELM Lanc chips to control the camera functions.) I have Javelin chips controlling the pan/tilt-camera LANC (which I will change to Propeller - should be able to put the LANC contoller in a COG), but for now, I really would like to use the Propeller as the user interface. ( I have LCD TV's coming out of my ears......... tongue.gif )

    Started building a simple UI, with buttons, with text on each, but quickly run out of space in memory. The double buffered bitmaps really eat it up.

    Any suggestions, thoughts, etc on how to make the TV display more useful,
    Thx,
    Mike

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    Chip Gracey
    Parallax, Inc.
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