Teensy 3.2 and Nextion Display

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Raymond_B

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Getting used to the Nextion editor and playing around with displaying some data. The display is very nice, the editor needs help. But with a little fiddling you can get stuff done.

Here's a quick video of me playing around with a small background image and displaying some data on top of it. I am just picking up 0-5v off A0 on the Teensy and changing up the numbers in the sketch. I also picked up a USB to serial UART board so I could connect directly to the display from my PC. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007R5DA7Q?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

This is with no Nextion libraries loaded.

https://youtu.be/xwzE4Q0uz74
 
Some more goofing around, this time with real data via CAN from the Megasquirt. Also playing around with multiple pages and the touch buttons. Just downloaded stock image files for some of the backgrounds. I'll try fancier Photoshopped ones later. Although for gauges I like high contrast.

https://youtu.be/m3MqVyxWRAY

The Nextion is set at 115200 baud, but I noticed you can really bog it down if not careful. So I used some of the tricks shown to me in my last attempt by defragster to be a bit more efficient. Still a bunch of work to do as far as optimizing, but it's getting there.

Again, this is with no Nextion libraries loaded. I have not seen the need for any yet as I can accomplish what I want by just sending serial commands. I did run in to one item though, that progress bars to not like floating values. So I had to be sneaky and declare new variables and the values as unsigned integers for the bars. The text boxes display floating point values no problem.

View attachment Nextion_CAN_Logger_Green.ino
 
Just wanted to load the Nextion Editor to check out how it works. Big fail! Apparently, it is Windows only software, built with the horrible .NET framework, which is an absolute no-go in my eyes! IMNSHFO, Windows is a nice consumer OS but not an environment for developing software.
 
Just wanted to load the Nextion Editor to check out how it works. Big fail! Apparently, it is Windows only software, built with the horrible .NET framework, which is an absolute no-go in my eyes! IMNSHFO, Windows is a nice consumer OS but not an environment for developing software.

Heh, boy there's fodder for a discussion :)

Anyway, I did see on their Indigogo campaign the promise of other OS support. No idea when though.
 
Again, this is with no Nextion libraries loaded.
Looks promising ... I just ordered one display, so prototyping will be faster than with the &%$§$&#& breadbords ... ;-) But here in Germany the leading IT magazine "c't" just presented the system with an nice feature, so the delivery waiting list is long ...
 
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... built with the horrible .NET framework, which is an absolute no-go in my eyes! IMNSHFO, Windows is a nice consumer OS but not an environment for developing software.
Well, good that we have freedom of speech :cool: Coming from Unix (yeah, real Unix) and later coding on Atari and then (less voluntary) on windows (but with Delphi - this was THE IDE), the .NET framework was the best developing software from Microsoft I've ever seen. And as the main developer of Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg is (or was) responsiblle for C# under .Net, there reached a good quality level with this framework and language. And to complete it alltogether - it's now Open Source, so feel free to contribute to eliminate the horror ... :)

Edit: ok, SCNR, but as it's OT, I will be quiet here about .NET ...
 
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Nothing against frameworks in general... ;) I just learned hating the .NET framework at my day job where I have (among other tasks) to administer about 40 Windows PCs and it's always the .NET framework updates which make Windows Update long and slow. And once the update installed, it's not finished, since a background task seems to re-compile tons of scripts which eats tons of system resources.

The Arduino IDE, Eclipse, and NetBeans prove that multi-platform IDEs may be created. Thus, the Nextion guys could have built their tool with Java (which updates within minutes without blocking the system for hours).
 
It seems very rare for any company that develops an application on the .NET framework to ever end up porting to Linux or Mac. Maybe this case will be an exception?
 
No really, but my company had a software (ERP) which was written in clipper..
That time, i was admin for the NOVELL server... (yes *g* only one server :)
 
Looks promising ... I just ordered one display, so prototyping will be faster than with the &%$§$&#& breadbords ... ;-) But here in Germany the leading IT magazine "c't" just presented the system with an nice feature, so the delivery waiting list is long ...


I ordered my display yesterday, 15:30 and got it today.. ("Komputer.de")

Why did they limit the serial speed to 115200 ?? :mad:
This means "our" ILI9341 will be faster on some operations than the nextion... the TX of some basic commands (like drawing a line for example) takes longer than executing them.
 
I'm still waiting for mine which I'm ordered directly from itead.cc. I see the speed problem which you mention, Frank, but I hope (and that's why I ordered one for testing) that their tool allows to readily design and to save in the display's flash memory the whole GUI, so that the data exchange between the teensy and the display can be reduced to a minimum (live data to update the display and touch commands to be received).
 
Yes, for a gui, its better. And the 16MB flash helps a lot.
But for "highly dynamic" contents...don't know. I did'nt expect the delivery so fast - now i have no time to test it :) In two or three weeks, maybe...
I wonder if it is fast enough to display 16 bargraphs for a audio-FFT ?


Do you know if alphablending is possible ?
 
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I was too curious and played a bit with the editor and Display.
I'm disappointed. Very.
It takes ages to upload. Well, WHEN it uploads. it's unstable. The editor is "§$%&/. The available commands are...

Anybody can it do it 100x better and faster with a Teensy (LC?) as dedicated "GPU", spi flash and ILI9341 touch... it could be lightning fast and much better.

We could do the Teensy-software part on one or two weekends.. The pcb on one weekend.. The only problem is a better editor. Maybe misuse GIMP ?
 
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Well, give me some days to write an Editor in Java ... this is no big deal (I wrote picture processing software once for a living, so my skills had been proven ... ;-) Old Atari users might recall the "Chagall" image processor ... oh yes, ancient times ... sorry, I'm drifting away ... :cool: :rolleyes:

The main problem will be the definition of the protocol for the object manipulation and the event processing.
 
It takes ages to upload. Well, WHEN it uploads. it's unstable. The editor is "§$%&/. The available commands are...
Again: same findings on my side ... :mad: I did not pay > 50EUR for a pile of crap (sorry) ... And the "documentation" is not worth mentioning, so I don't want to call it a fraud but they sell a heavy overrated product ...
 
That sounds disappointing. I had put much hope into that. I expected being able to design a GUI with 2 bar graphs, and a text field which I could easily actualize from the Teensy 4 or 5 times a second, and 4 touch buttons (up/down/left/right) which would save me two rotary encoders and their wiring...
 
It looks more and more like a fraud. Just looked somewhat deeper into their music player example which in the demo video seems to have a nice FFT bar graph display. Now, when looking into details and the example code, I discover that the bar graph is only alimented with random data.
 
What I still don't understand is why a serious magazine like C'T writes such an relatively enthusiastic article. If they had tested the Nextion display and GUI editor thoroughly, they'd come to different conclusions, I think.
 
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