Trace Systems, Inc

It's always helpful to be able to display images on your embedded web device, both for visual appeal and to help the user understand what to do.

The trouble with images is that they can take up a lot of the very limited storage space on your embedded device, AND bitmaps can look blocky and bad if they aren't shown at just the right size.

TCPmaker ethernet controller software provides a Px control that can display two kinds of images: compressed .JPG images, and Adobe Flash .SWF files.

[video demo show]

We recommend that you use Flash .SWF images, for these reasons:

• Flash uses vector art, so it always looks crisp, with no jagged lines even when the size is scaled up or down.
• The .SWF file format is very cleverly designed to need very little space compared to even a compressed .JPG image.  You'll be amazed at how much image complexity you can squeeze into only 1-2 KB of storage on your device.
• Flash lets you add drop shadows and gradients, to give your image a beautiful 3-D look, with very little extra storage requirement.
• Flash lets your image MOVE.  The rotating Microchip logo animation, shown in the demo above, only took up around 900 bytes of storage.

Because TCPmaker allows controls and background elements to be layered on top of each other, you can use a Px control to display something like a piping diagram of the system you need to control, and then place TCPmaker controls on top of the diagram at strategic places: vertical gauges on top of tanks, to show liquid levels, buttons next to pumps, to turn the pump on or off, and so on.