GUI Tailored to small TFTs?

[tommie tippee]

Hi there,

I have a newbie question.

I just got my Ozzmaker 3.5 inch TFT running with the Pi. Great!

Suppose I wanted to develop button and menu driven application that used the TFT display. What I’d like is some kind of framework with buttons, menus and display widgets that is specifically tailored for small TFT displays such as the OzzMaker.

A framework that allows you to display large buttons, and snappy clear widgets and stuff like that on small touch screen displays.

A typical interaction might be something like the following:
System boots up and displays 6 buttons that take up the whole screen. User presses say the button marked “read temperature, and is presented with a car speedometer style dial displaying the temperature…

X windows seems like overkill for something like this. Is there anything out there, smaller light weight, opes source, make for small touch screens?

Cheers,

Tim

[Mark Williams]

Hi Tim… I am not aware of any framework…. And I would love to know also.

However, I did write up some information on how to create some virtual buttons on the screen to control the GPIO. This writes directly to the framebuffer, so no X is required;

https://ozzmaker.com/2013/09/10/controlling-the-gpio-on-a-raspberry-pi-with-a-touchscreen/

I have been thinking of updating it for PiScreen and cleaning the code up a bit. I’m not sure if anyone would be interested.

Mark --OzzMaker.com --

[rob]

Hi Tim, Hi Mark,

just recently I had a similar issue when I was integrating a Raspi B+ into an old tape recorder from the good old 70s (see photo attached) to get some web radio features using the music server mpd/mopidy. For user input I connected the buttons of the music tape system via GPIO and got the PiScreen for doing all the rest (selecting radio streams and composing play-lists).

On the hunt for suitable software for this purpose I looked into xbmc/kodi to serve as a play-list editor. However that seemed a little over the top. Then I stumbled upon the mopidy touch-screen extension (mopidy_touchscreen) hosted on github. This extension (as seen on the photo) is written with pygame and there is no X server in need.

Possibly the pygame library might serve as a framework for simple development of basic user input GUIs for the PiScreen.

Regards,
rob

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[9and3r]

Hi

I am the developer of mopidy-touchscreen.
Happy to see that people is using the extension 🙂

Just wondering if I can use Rob’s image in the github page as an example. (The tape recorder with the screen looks great!)

For the framework question, I do not know anything that like that. But you could use pygame and maybe these code can be helpful:

Screen Objects
ListView

Good luck!

[heatvent]

Mark Williams wrote:

Hi Tim… I am not aware of any framework…. And I would love to know also.

However, I did write up some information on how to create some virtual buttons on the screen to control the GPIO. This writes directly to the framebuffer, so no X is required;

https://ozzmaker.com/2013/09/10/controlling-the-gpio-on-a-raspberry-pi-with-a-touchscreen/

I have been thinking of updating it for PiScreen and cleaning the code up a bit. I’m not sure if anyone would be interested.

Mark, I would be interested in using this. Probably in a slightly different way. Rather than controlling LED’s, it would be great if the buttons could be used to execute scripts. For example, I am using gphoto2 to copy photos off a SD card to a USB drive. I would like to trigger the script to copy photos by pressing a button, then return back to the buttons once executed. Also having a button to properly shutdown the pi would be useful.

Hi!

[Mark Williams]

I am thinking that I could modify the program with the virtual buttons to run a script which can be stored in a .ini file.
Maybe even have the text label for the buttons read from the ini file also.

Mark --OzzMaker.com --

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