SEGGER AppWizard Enabling Advanced GUI Design in Next Generation Embedded Applications

SEGGER has released AppWizard, presenting engineers with a powerful new tool for creating complete, ready-to-run applications for the company’s popular emWin embedded graphics library. AppWizard is intuitive to operate and comes with its own built-in resource management capabilities. It facilitates the use of all of emWin’s core functions, such as the rendering of animations, language management, widgets, etc.

One of AppWizard’s notable features is the ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) editor. This allows engineers to design application interfaces, along with their related interactions and events, and immediately see what these applications will actually look like. In addition, AppWizard integrates a play mode for easy testing of created applications in a simulated environment. Simply pressing F5 runs the current state of the application, just like debugging in an IDE.

The construction of embedded GUI applications with AppWizard is made very straightforward, requiring little to no prior experience with emWin or even C-programming. By applying signals and slots/interactions, the application’s behavior can be defined with ease. For example, creating a button to change a value is done with just a few clicks.

With its integrated resource management, all resources (such as fonts and images) are automatically converted to internal formats and added to the project. Resources can be stored in internal memory or offloaded to external media.

Support for board-level packages enables AppWizard to generate ready-to-use target applications. These packages include the setup of the target hardware and display for a seamless start, as well as SEGGER’s comprehensive emFile file system to make placing of resources on an SD card or some other form of external memory simple.

AppWizard outputs a bundle of C source files to work with any target system that has at least 32kByte of RAM and 128kByte of ROM. A MS Visual Studio simulation project enables debugging of the application and the adding of custom code to be carried out even if the final target hardware is not (yet) available.

“The new AppWizard streamlines the whole process of constructing even complex graphical applications, without the need for solid knowledge of how emWin works,” states Jörg Ehrle, Product Manager for emWin at SEGGER. “Our emWin PRO customers will now be able to benefit from a complete turnkey solution.”

“We have collaborated with SEGGER for many years to make emWin a key component of our software strategy for microcontrollers,” says Joe Yu, Vice President and General Manager of the Low-Power MPU & MCU Product Line at NXP® Semiconductors. “emWin’s easy-to-use API, efficiency and documentation are outstanding and easy to use within our MCUXpresso SDK packages. The introduction of new AppWizard makes it easy and fast to create stunning graphical user interfaces on our Arm® Cortex®-M microcontroller devices, from the lowest cost devices to our high-performance i.MX RT crossover platforms.”

“Renesas Electronics highly values SEGGER as a strategic partner that offers fantastic human machine interface solutions based on their emWin embedded graphics user interface,” says Daryl Khoo, Vice President of Marketing, IoT Platform Business Division at Renesas. “emWin reaches across our widely scalable RX microcontrollers and recently became a part of our Flexible Software Package (FSP) for the Renesas Advanced (RA) Family of 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M microcontrollers. We are excited about SEGGER’s new, intuitive AppWizard GUI design tool for emWin, which offers an even greater out-of-the-box experience for our customers.”

For more information about emWin and AppWizard, please go to: https://www.segger.com/emwin  (under Tools)

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