Embedded Wizard News 03/11, September 30th. 2011

 

Embedded Wizard's Graphics Engine 2.0 available for many new chipsets and OS

 

TARA Systems' GUI development Tool "Embedded Wizard" (EmWi) which has been established in the Consumer Electronics (CE) branch since 2003, continues to expand the support for new platforms in the CE area, but also industrial, automotive, medical and home appliances. Especially the new graphics engine 2.0 enables highly optimized performance and an easy adaptation to new chipsets with or without 2D/3D graphics accelerators, but also to various operating systems, e.g. Linux, Android, Apple iOS and WindowsCE, as well as graphics APIs such as OpenGL and DirectFB.

 

To support Google's Android, the Embedded Wizard platform package has been adapted to Android's NDK incl. OpenGL and now enables the generation of ANSI-C code, which has been verified on several Android devices. Thus, developers can re-use complete UIs or UI components from previous projects for Android applications.

 

Furthermore, the application range of Embedded Wizard has been extended by releasing several new GE2.0 based platform packages, e.g. for:

 

  • Atmel SAM9G45
  • Toshiba TMPA900
  • Zoran Digital Camera chipsets

 

In the CE area, Embedded Wizard has been adapted and verified on many new platforms, e.g. :

 

  • Fujitsu H61 (DirectFB)
  • ST Freeman (DirectFB, OpenGL)
  • Zoran DTV/DVD/STB platforms (generic and OpenGL)
  • Planned: BCM 40 nm chipsets

 

Additionally, TARA has now released a generic platform package. It can be adapted by customers, which want to use specific, currently unsupported chipsets, e.g. various FPGAs, which are common for industrial and household appliances.

 

 

Extended Mosaic 2.0 with new widgets and examples

The new class library Mosaic 2.0 has been introduced together with Graphics Engine 2.0 in latest Embedded Wizard V6.0 earlier this year. Mosaic 2.0 provides widgets and templates which enable a faster startup and also let developers benefit from new Graphics Engine 2.0 features. Detailed information on the new EmWi V6.0 and Mosaic 2.0 can be found online:

http://www.embedded-wizard.de/embedded-wizard-v60.html

 

Now, Mosaic 2.0 has been extended with new widgets and examples for e.g. creating menus or multiline editors, as well as the well known demos Lightweight 3D and Screensaver now adapted to Mosaic 2.0.The new version of Mosaic 2.0 is planned to be released together with new Embedded Wizard V6.10 end of October 2011.

 

 

News in brief

Embedded Wizard GUI & stereoscopic 3D

The application range of EmWi is not only extended regarding different chipsets, but also different scenarios and use cases. For example, Embedded Wizard user interfaces can be deployed in devices with stereoscopic 3D TV, which naturally require an adapted GUI. For that scenario, the GUI project in EmWi remains unchanged. The transformation of the 2D GUI is performed in the platform package which controls the framebuffer access of the underlying platforms. Thus, the 2D user interface plane can be flexibely positioned over the 3D video plane. This technique is used now for example by German Premium TV manufacturer "Metz" for their 3D TV product line.

 

Customers continue successful usage of EmWi

Besides Metz, also the German Premium CE manufacturers Loewe and Kathrein / Technotrend Görler recently decided to continue using Embedded Wizard for the UI development of their next generation products on several hardware platforms. Based on years of experience and successful developments with Embedded Wizard, the companies concluded - also after evaluation of competitor solutions - to deploy the latest version of Embedded Wizard including Graphics Engine 2.0 and new class library Mosaic 2.0 to guarantee an efficient development cycle and excellent graphics performance in the future.