Updated iMON (Soundgraph) LCD Driver

[ralphy]

Originally Posted by chrissi

Hi,

I cannot test the display with Windows and the linux driver is just catching up to the "Win-driver-status". I'd like to know what exactly this shutoff-mode is. Is it only clearing the display or is the backlight turned off then?! I just don't want to let the LEDs to be turned on 16 hours a day, they losing their brightness in times when no one sees the display. I'm used to turning off the backlight of my Matrix Orbital display and would like to keep on doing so with the imon lcd.

Thanks for any hints!
Chrissi

Code 0x5000000000000008 turns the display completely off. Nothing displayed and backlight off.

See here and here for more details on the 0x50 and 0x51 control words

[cybrmage]

Originally Posted by Johan

I think the latest 7/9 driver is a bit slow in displaying (changing between text) and seems to hang sometimes for quite a while. Sometimes I have to wait 5-10 seconds before it updates what I am currently doing.

I have this problem too... when I'm running the debug version of the driver (it is so slow due to the amount of logging that it will sometimes take 10 or 15 seconds before the display shuts down AFTER mediaportal is terminated)... Make sure that you are using the release version..

Also... you will never get it to a point where the display updates as fast as you surf from menu to menu.... the externaldisplay thread (that feeds data to the display driver) runs at the lowest possible priority... so when media portal is busy (changing the screen or pling media) the display thread will be suspended for longer periods of time... causing the lag...

Originally Posted by Johan

I can not play a normal audio CD. If I insert a CD the icon is showing CD detected. But it is not spinning and the music never starts. If I enter "My Music" and try "Play CD" nothing happens

I experienced the same problem with 0.2.3RC2... but it has nothing to do with the display driver... a reinstall of RC2 fixed it.

Originally Posted by Johan

I actually think that the turn off function of the display at standby/hibernation is broken in newer versions of the driver. I have not paid much attention to this lately but now I was trying it and it is only working in iMONLCDg_09_02_2007 version. In later version it is not working (at least not for me).

Please run the debug version of the newest plugin.. put your machine into sleep/standby/hibernate and see what happens... if it doesn't work, post the log so I can see what's going on...

Originally Posted by darkaz

have you had any luck with the IR to date? - I'd love to see this functioning as using the ir "dongle" that comes with my DTV1000T card really ruins the look of the antec case (and I'm not quite ready to go drilling holes and modding a brand new case just yet )

I've been working on it (and direct USB communications with the display... but nothing working yet (you can see the USB class functions in the new source code if you want to play with it).

The strange thing is that the Antec VFD software opens the SG_RC.dll file, sets up the IR hardware and then never calls the library again... it seems to communicate directly with the display driver... so getting things working is time-consuming and difficult.

Originally Posted by darkaz

one thing I've been thinking about is possibly manipulating the text display a bit further - (I'll try to have a look at this over the next week or so) - some ideas follow:

- scrolling the text by pixels rather than complete characters would produce a more "fluid" display (how many pixels to shift it at a time might be an option perhaps?)

Possibly... but the driver does not control the data to be displayed... the externaldisplay thread sends the data to the driver... The driver does not know what data is comming next... it could be a scrolled line, or a completely different line.. so the code to handle every possible situation would be complex and would slow the display down more than it already is...

Originally Posted by darkaz

- adding icons to the display - e.g. if you're in tv mode, rather than just highlighting the little tv icon on the lcd (which is a great feature - just not visible at all from 2.5metres) perhaps using the first 16x16 pixels on the left to display a tv icon - admittedly this reduces the available real estate for text, but imho would be a worthy trade-off

Interesting idea... If you create the icons... (my graphics ability sucks)... I'll add the code to the driver...

Originally Posted by darkaz

- allowing fontsets to be included as an additional file for the bitmap text - rather than hard coding this, why not have a variety of available "fonts" so people can further customize the display without having to compile/recompile (as I'm sure there's plenty of users out there who just don't want to do this)

This would be an extension of custom character sets (as used in the LCDsmartie driver).... should be trivial to add... but the data for the fonts (a multi-dimentional array) would need to be stored in the XML file... I haven't had the chance to experiment with it yet

[/quote]



And... without further delay... the newest version of the driver.

FIXED: code that checks the VFD or iMON process was throwing exceptions in some instances... (I needed to do a complete uninstall to duplicate this one...)

FIXED: The display detection routine threw exceptions under certain conditions.

FIXED: critical process mutex was not functioning correctly, causing intermittent display corruption.

CHANGED: updated the icon thread to sleep less and send less duplicate data to the display, hopefully speeding the display slightly.

[iSP]

Wah, this one works flawlessly for me
You've even be so kind to add an option for the disc icon, thank you for that

That problem with the cd happens to me with a dvd, and yes that's a rc2 issue as rc1 doesn't have this problem icw this plugin.
I think the plugin is quite ready now, I'm not sure if any of the icons are not mapped yet? seen most of them work now.

[darkaz]

Originally Posted by cybrmage

I've been working on it (and direct USB communications with the display... but nothing working yet (you can see the USB class functions in the new source code if you want to play with it).

The strange thing is that the Antec VFD software opens the SG_RC.dll file, sets up the IR hardware and then never calls the library again... it seems to communicate directly with the display driver... so getting things working is time-consuming and difficult.

Sounds particularly painful... and a bit out of my league where c# is concerned

Originally Posted by cybrmage

Possibly... but the driver does not control the data to be displayed... the externaldisplay thread sends the data to the driver... The driver does not know what data is comming next... it could be a scrolled line, or a completely different line.. so the code to handle every possible situation would be complex and would slow the display down more than it already is...

hmmm... will have a think about this - I wrote some basic drivers a while back for HD44780 LCDs and included some scrolling text functions which were quite independent and could be easily adapted to be pixel based, combine this with what's in there now and we should be able to get a result

Originally Posted by cybrmage

Interesting idea... If you create the icons... (my graphics ability sucks)... I'll add the code to the driver...

I'll make a start on these - was hoping to get them done this evening, but not sure I'll be able to keep my eyes open long enough.

Originally Posted by cybrmage

This would be an extension of custom character sets (as used in the LCDsmartie driver).... should be trivial to add... but the data for the fonts (a multi-dimentional array) would need to be stored in the XML file... I haven't had the chance to experiment with it yet

I've written a little browser based "gui" for editing characters and returning the relevant hex codes for use within the iMonLCDG.cs code - or as you say for linking to an external xml file containing these - you can have a play with it at http://blogs.igeek.com.au/DarkAz/blo...om_MediaPortal

any chance you could add in the ability to do these via an external file (if specified under advanced settings, otherwise default to the standard)? I'd be more than happy to create some fontsets for people to have a play with [see below for further font development]

ok here's a start on a basic fontset.... thus far only a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and some punctuation has been done (apologies to those who require a full set - I'll try to finish it up asap) - let me know your thoughts and I'll finish it up - if nothing else this was a simple proof of concept, if anyone's interested in a specific type of font (e.g. bold slab serif) then let me know and I'll see what I can do - keeping in mind that it's quite limiting at this pixel size

http://blogs.igeek.com.au/DarkAz/code/iMONLCDg_09_12_2007_NewFont.zip

[iSP]

Nice font, looks way better this way!
I got some time and tried to make some icons for weather/settings/my tv/my dvd/my movies/my pictures/etc.
I'll add them as attachement, each one 16x16, comments welcome

[darkaz]

Originally Posted by iSP

Nice font, looks way better this way!

Thanks - guess that means I'd better finish it off?

Think we need to incorporate a way to choose a font to load rather than having to recompile varsions just to change the font <nudge><nudge>

Originally Posted by iSP

I got some time and tried to make some icons for weather/settings/my tv/my dvd/my movies/my pictures/etc.
I'll add them as attachement, each one 16x16, comments welcome

Great start - I'll have a play with them tonight and add in some that I've already started - next question (for CybrMage) is how do you want to store the icons? as four 8x8 icons in a similar format to the font characters? or differently?

[cybrmage]

Here is todays version of the plugin:

Added: Ability to use a custom font an XML file (option on Advanced Settings page)
Added: Ability to use "Large Icons" and customized "Large Icons" (option on Advanced Settings Page)

The Custom Font is stored in an XML file (ExternalDisplay_imonlcdg_font.xml) in the main MediaPortal directory. If you select the "Use Custom Font" option, and a font file does NOT exist, one will be created with the data from the internal font.

The font data is configured as 6 columns of data, drawn left to right with the LSB of each column being the top row of pixels (a holdover from RaplhY's original font data.)

The font file that is included in the archive contains the font created by Darkaz.


The Custom "Large Icons" (16 x 16 - placed to the left of the display) are stored in an XML file (ExternalDisplay_imonlcdg_icons.xml) in the main MediaPortal directory. If you select the "Use Custom Large Icons" option and an icon file does NOT exist, one will be created that contains the internal "Large Icon" data.

If you want to use the "Large Icons", set the text width to 13 instead of 16... so that the text alignment performed by the ExternalDisplay core does not force data off the screen.

Currently, there are no internal icons defined, just two icons (solid box and outlined box) for testing purposes.

There is support for up to 10 icons, but only the first 6 are currently used. They are defined as follows:
0 = IDLE
1 = TV
2 = MOVIE (DVD actually)
3 = MUSIC
4 = VIDEO
5 = RECORDING (only displays when MediaPortal is otherwise idle)

The Icon Data is configured as two rows of 16 columns ( Line 1 is IData0 thorough IData15, line 2 is IData16 through IData31, for pixel data - LSB is the bottom row of pixels [the displays native format].) drawn left to right, top to bottom.


The data is stored in the XML file as decimal values.

[iSP]

"Large icon" option works, haven't tried to add any icons yet, but so far it looks good.

[Kossan]

Works fine!

[Mangavin]

I will receive a HTPC in few days. It will be my first one and want to try Mediaportal... I read for days this forum. I've seen this thread and I'm happy to note than the GDO1 MXR interest so many people. Thanks to you (and you are rapid besides all)