topic Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries in Components

Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

Christian_L — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 21:15:24 GMT

Please provide feedback, comments, and questions on the following reference designs in this thread.

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Re: Touch Panel Registry Access

Aui — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:47:26 GMT

Wow, this is really great work. Thank you so much for that library. It came just in time for our projects.

I immeditately tried it on LV 8.5.1 on a x86 third party Touch Panel (Syslogic) running win ce5.0 and it works phantastic.

Now that we have this great features available some questions come to my mind:

Is this library also running on ARM and did you try it on LV 8.6?

If I got it right your library does not require something like a function RegSave.exe like it was published in http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/03EBFA9BE4718CEE8625722F0009C396

to safe the settings. But it requires a reboot. Although the helper executables of above link provide a reboot it does not work on my x86 target. It would help very much to be able to reboot even third party Touch Panels with such a reboot call. How can that be done?

Thank you again for this really great library.

Franz

Re: Touch Panel Registry Access

ryank — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:54:36 GMT

Hi Franz,

Glad you found it useful. I have tested it on LabVIEW 8.6, but have only tested on NI's touch panels. Since it uses standard Windows CE API calls that are pretty constant across CE versions, it should work on most hardware as long as it has a full implementation of CE.

As for programatically rebooting, I believe you can do it with the KernelIOControl function, but I haven't actually written a LabVIEW routine to do so. It's good feedback to know that you need it though, I'll put it on my list of things to do in the future, although I cannot give an estimate on how long it will take me to get to it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Ryan King

NI Systems Engineer

Message Edited by ryank on 11-04-2008 05:52 PM

Message Edited by ryank on 11-04-2008 05:53 PM

Message Edited by ryank on 11-04-2008 05:54 PM

Touch Panel Window Manipulation

WireHobbler — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:46:22 GMT

Thank you for providing this functionality!

Currently (as happens all-too-often), I am designing code without the hardware. In this case, the code is a UI and the target will be a TPC-2012, once we get one in house. I have been developing a LV project with UI pages inside the a NI TPC-2012 Device target, but I need to keep at least one vi in My Computer target (otherwise I am asked to compile the code to the TPC target, which we don't have!). This has worked fine up till now.

However the Windows Manipulation vi's throw up an error dialog at runtime "Supported only on PDAs". Is this due to the inline C code? More impotantly, is there anyway to emulate their functionality on my development PC while we wait for the hardware?

Thank you.

Re: Touch Panel Window Manipulation

ryank — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:34:53 GMT

Unfortunately, there is not a way to emulate the inline C node on Windows targets. I'm hoping at some point they will implement it for Windows targets, since it is much easier for doing this sort of thing than the CLF nodes are, but it's currently a new feature and is supported only on PDAs, touch panels, and embedded targets.

I can think of a couple of possible solutions:

1. Make the same calls using Call Library Function nodes. This should work on both Windows and the Touch Panel, but it's going to be a lot of work.

2. Use a conditional disable around the inline C nodes and perform similar operations. In Windows, most of the functions are available through VI server. This has the drawback that you won't really be testing the code, but will at least allow you to test the rest of your code.

3. Look into setting up an emulator for the hardware. I've never done this with a touch panel, but I've done it with PDAs before. It's usually a pain to get it all set up, but if you find a good emulator it's the most accurate way to test code.

Regards,

Ryan King

NI Systems Engineer

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

boyko — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:33:23 GMT

I found the Window Manipulation library useful for my TPC-2106 application - thank you very much. However, the Hide/ Show Taskbar VIs didn't work until I debugged and modified the line:

if(!(hwnd = FindWindow(_T("HHTaskBar"), _T("")))) - the original was: if(!(hwnd = FindWindow(_T("HHTaskBar"), "")))

It's also a shame that after hiding the Taskbar I have to mess with all my HMI "pages" (20 off, add Maximize VI window). The same inconvenience applies to Hide Mouse Cursor.

Regards

Boyko Bejaniyski

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

ryank — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:11:54 GMT

Thanks for the feedback Boyco,

The _T, is interesting. I haven't tested on a 2106, my 2012 worked without specifying a wide character for empty strings, but you are correct that they really should be wide. I'll make an update to the library.

I was a little confused about the second part of your post. The Hide Taskbar VI should automatically Maximize the window if you pass it the name of your VI, and the Hide Mouse Cursor shouldn't require maximizing the window.

Regards,

Ryan King

Systems Engineer

National Instruments

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

boyko — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:25:19 GMT

Dear Ryan

To clarify the second part of my message: Once you hide the task bar in the first window, which of course maximizes this first window of the application (in my case an HMI with "pages" and HNE), you have to maximize every other "page" window, otherwise they don't fill the space of the missing task bar. I probably had to explain also: Prior to discovering your new libraries, I was hiding the taskbar by setting its properties accordingly.

I didn't mean that hiding the mouse cursor needs maximizing the windows - it's labour-intensive to put it in every window, same as with the maximizing for the taskbar.

Regards

Boyko

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

ryank — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:03:55 GMT

Ahh, now I understand. As far as maximizing the windows, you should be able to maximize all open windows by calling the VI in a for loop with the Window names. Of course, if you are opening and closing windows, you'll still need to have a way to handle that. As you mention, an alternate way to hide the taskbar is just to modify its settings in the registry. You can do that programmatically using the registry access library that is also covered in this thread, I think I even included an example with the correct key names. The disadvantage of that aproach is that you generally have to reboot for the registry settings to take effect. As for the mouse, it's a window specific setting, so I haven't found a way to get around running the hide mouse cursor VI on each window.

Regards,

Ryan King

Systems Engineer

National Instruments

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

boyko — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:09:41 GMT

Thanks, Ryan

Indeed in my HMI applications I close each old page before opening the next. I may be better off with the registry settings for the task bar, it's a good option to do it programmatically and not rely on production engineers to do the settings for each unit.

Regards

Boyko Bejaniyski

Re: Touch Panel Registry Access

ryank — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:16:48 GMT

I found some time to implement a reboot VI for the touch panel. I'll eventually include it in the Registry Access library, but for the moment it's attached to this post. Note that it calls one of the error handling VIs from the registry access library so you'll need that library installed.

Ryan King

NI Systems Engineer

Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

Desruelle_luc — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:02:30 GMT

Thank you for that library. This is really great work.

Luc

Re: Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

ryank — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:48:31 GMT

Glad you found it useful. Let us know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Ryan K.

NI Systems Engineer

Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

Desruelle_luc — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:59:05 GMT

Hello. I want to duplicate TPC. Where can i find a tool? I’ve read in the article “Best-Practices for Touch Panel Deployment » there is an « Replicating an NI 6” Touch Panel », but I don’t find it. It’s a non NI TPC…

Re: Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

ryank — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:18:09 GMT

We are still working on getting that document posted. We do have code to replicate a 6" TPC, but I'm not sure how well it will work on a non-NI touch panel. The process should be pretty similar though. I'm going to attach the code to this post, but keep in mind that it's not in a finalized version.

Re : Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

Desruelle_luc — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:51:39 GMT

I’ve tried it on an Advantech TPC 66 (replication 6’’) and this program works fine. Thank you

Touch Panel "Defer Update Panel"

Mathieu. — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:24:54 GMT

Hello,

I read all your comments on Registry Access and Replication Management that are very useful for us (thanks !!!) and I think that maybe you can answer to this question.

I work on a big project for PDA application with LV 8.6 Mobile Module (that could be deployed on Pocket PC2003, CE 5.0, and Mobile 6 targets) and I encounter some problems with display refresh : For my controls & indicators when I want to set their property to visible or not (changing periodically), I have got sequential blinking/flashing effect on each controls & indicators and the application performances strongly decrease which is very bad for a monitoring application.

I wonder if it is possible with Mobile Mobule (or maybe with Touch Panel Module) to defer Panel update (as we can do with LV on WinXP target) and if this action could increase my application performances ???

Re: Touch Panel "Defer Update Panel"

ryank — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:14:16 GMT

Because defering panel updates is something that happens in LabVIEW rather than in the underlying window, I don't think it's something you could implement using the Windows CE API. Some of my touch panel apps do hide and show controls without difficulty, but I don't do much programming for mobile devices, which probably have less processing power. One thing that used to be common when doing graphics programming was to double buffer the images, this means you have one image in the background and another in the foreground, you update the background image, and then switch the two. I think you could probably do the same thing with front panels using some of the window manipulation VIs (i.e. have two very similar front panels, make all the updates to one, and then show it and hide the other. Next time you need a big update, do the same process in reverse). I have no idea if the overhead of having two VIs open would be any better than the overhead of the screen updates, but it's worth a shot. I'd also suggest you post this question in one of the more general forums, as it's not something I've looked into.

Regards,

Ryan K.

Re : Re: Touch Panel "Defer Update Panel"

Mathieu. — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:24:17 GMT

Hello Ryan,

Thanks for your answer and to try to give me a workaround for my problem.

I'm going to see this and post it on general forum (http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&thread.id=435942)

Regards.

Mathieu

Re: Touch Panel Reference Design Libraries

jeffyy — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:32:52 GMT

i am using the libraries and they do work, but my window maximizes before it resizes. what can be done about this?