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Forum Topic - Aviage HMI and iMX25: (4 Items)
   
Aviage HMI and iMX25  
Hello,
I hope I am posting this in the right place, otherwise I will hopefully be pointed at the right place or person. 
I am working on a new development project using the iMX25 together with QNX. For the GUI I had planned to use Photon. 
However, last week I saw the presentation from Sheridan Ethier, in which he showed a demo where the iMX 25 was used 
together with the aviage HMI suite to create a very modern looking user interface. I am very interested in this 
technology however also have some general questions:
Our product will have an 800 x 600 pixel display. If we don't intend to display any video on and the only regular "higly
" dynamic element will be a graph in which four data plots will be updated every 5 to 10 seconds, will the iMX25 
(400MHz) be powerful enough to handle this. 
Where Can I get more information on how these User Interfaces are created. Especially, how does my User Interface that i
 create with Adobe Creative Suite end of communicating with my application? How do I send data back and forth? 
Are there any demo projects? Is there a trial version of the Aviage HMI Suite? $
The strength I see in this is that I don't need to take the HMI design from my designer who already uses Photoshop, and 
now try to reimplement that using photon. I would hope to save a lot of time and energy in using the Aviage HMI Suite to
 directly use those designs. 

Thank you for your help

Marcel
Re: Aviage HMI and iMX25  
Hi Marcus,

If you already have an i.MX25 PDK board, you can download the demo from the webinar and try it out:

www.qnx.com/freescale_imx25.html

On this site, there is also a preliminary user's guide.  Since the docs isn't 100% completed yet, I have also attached 
an engineering doc that describes the interfaces between the Flash HMI and the low level components via the PPS 
interface.

Note that this version doesn't have the backend drivers integrated in to show the Flash HMI talking to the services of 
the OS - an update will be posted in the next week or so.

Regarding the 800x600 resolution display, the answer will depend on what your HMI is doing.  We have only tried the 
640x480 screen that comes part of the i.MX25 PDK - switching full screens works well.  You would need to try it with the
 larger screen to see if performance of switching full screens is acceptable.  If your application doesn't required to 
switch the full screens, but only update content on a single screen, then it may be fine.

Regarding the updates of your 4 data plots, again the answer is "it depends".  To simply redraw the plots every 5-10 
seconds, it should be fine.  But if there are a lot of computations to generate the data for the plots, it might be too 
slow for your application to do those calculations in Flash/ActionScript.  If that is the case, you can look at getting 
your c-code backend to do those calculations, and then the Flash App just displays the results.  Or, for higher 
performance you can make use of the hardware layers of the i.MX25 graphics driver - one layer renders the Flash HMI, and
 the second layer is a c-code application that only renders the graphs (and is controlled by the Flash HMI).

Regarding getting a trial version of the Aviage HMI Suite, I would recommend getting in contact with your Sales 
representative who should be able to assist you.  The source code to the Smart Energy demo is also available through the
 Aviage HMI Suite site.

Thanks,
Sheridan

Attachment: Word SmartEnergyPanel_API_v1.1-1.doc 174 KB
Re: Aviage HMI and iMX25  
Attached is the documentation for PPS.  It is currently only available via the HMI Suite, but I believe it will be 
rolled in to the standard product starting in QNX 6.4.2.

Cheers,
Sheridan
Attachment: PDF pps_book.pdf 203.16 KB
Re: Aviage HMI and iMX25  
Hello Marcel,
I can't let the opportunity of having a new user go by. I would greatly appreciate any feedback or comments you might 
have on the PPS docs.
Nicola