PicoTK 0.03 review
DownloadPicoTK is a C GUI toolkit that requires only a minimum of memory resources
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PicoTK is a C GUI toolkit that requires only a minimum of memory resources. It readily works with the RTEMS real time kernel - its minimum complexity and OS independency makes a port to any operating system easy. It is not comparable featurewise with real full blown windowing toolkits like nanoX or Qt/Embedded, but serves the needs for simple memory mapped graphic presentation.
Here are some key features of "PicoTK":
Draw graphical primitives: points, lines, texts (different fonts, fixed and proportionally spaced using any X-Windows font ), filled rectangles, pixmaps
Driver is easily adaptable to "homebrew" embedded display hardware based on memory-mapped framebuffer
Generic drivers for 1, 4 and 8 bit per pixel color depth. Readily supporting VGA mode 0x11 (640x480x2), VGA mode 0x13 (320x200x8) and the VESA linear frame buffer modes (480x640x8 to 1280x1024x8) on graphic cards, which support VBE2.0 or higher.
Framebuffer emulator (fbe) for Linux using shared memory IPC. This is used for the development of the toolkit and can be used for the development of your application as well. That is you can have a simulation version of your application that run under Linux - and look at its emulated screen. Than you can cross-compile the same application for the target system.
Tool "fontripper" for converting X11 fonts into picoTK fonts. Use "ppmripper" for converting ppm portable pixmaps into picoTK pixmaps. Fonts and Pixmaps are encoded into linkable binaries, i.e. the system will be compiled into a single binary and does not require to have a filesystem.
Together with RTEMS (www.oarcorp.com) you can have a nice embedded system graphical output solely using GNU technology.
Use Linux as a development host for cross-compiling and as an emulation environment.
Allows easy adaption/porting to your favorite operating system or hardware architecture.
What's New in This Release:
Extensions to demo application
Updated HOWTO (currently only the ASCII version is included in the sources)
Added support for VESA VBE2.0 flat linear frame buffer
picoTermPrintf(): Added support for VT100/320 Escapes: Change color and move cursor.
toolkit: Change graphics configuration by changing toolkit/Makefile
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