DriverCore SDK

GX and Typhoon hardware, this includes, displays, cables and accessory cards.

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Fiery
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DriverCore SDK

Post by Fiery »

Hi,

New user here. I'd like to display full-screen bitmaps on a recently purchased GX Typhoon LCD, from my own application. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to gain access to the DriverCore SDK. I'd like to drive the LCD from a regular Windows C++ application, so it's not dotNET.

Thanks,
Fiery

Ray
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Ray »

Ever since the 2011 update, driver-core is no longer used, a normal windows driver with an IOCTL interface is used now so calling it from C++ should not be an issue. Now the bad news: we've never written a C++ library to use this driver (just a C# library) I threw together a quick C++ example that displays random noise to the screen, it's not the best code and by no stretch an SDK, but it should be enough to get you going, I only implemented the driver calls i absolutely needed but i've included a file called GXDriver.cs in the zipfile that'll show you what parameters the other calls expect. If you have any problems , questions or issues feel free to bug me :)
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GX.ZIP
GX msvc C/C++ example
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Fiery
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Fiery »

Thank you, that's awesome! You guys truly have an outstanding support staff.

I've checked the sources, and managed to make it work already. The only thing doesn't seem to work is IOCTL_GET_DEFAULT_CONTRAST. What sort of calling convention do I have to use for that? I've tried it like IOCTL_GET_DEFAULT_BACKLIGHT, but with a 1-byte long buffer, but it didn't work out. While IOCTL_GET_DEFAULT_BACKLIGHT with a 3-byte buffer works just fine, so as all the other calls I've tried to use.

Ray
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Ray »

Uhmmz, well this is embarrassing, it seems like IOCTL_GET_DEFAULT_CONTRAST got defined, but didn't get implemented which is why it's failing on you. I'll make a note to get this implemented, but it might be a bit before that'll happen, sorry about that.

Fiery
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Fiery »

Thank you for the clarification. It's not a huge problem for us, fortunately :) Till it gets implemented, can you please tell me what's the default contrast value for GX Typhoon devices? I'd guess somewhere around 160 (decimal), but I cannot verify that :(

Ray
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Ray »

The factory values we ship with :

Red: 255
Green: 255
Blue :255
Contrast: 114
IR: On

One more note, please be responsible with the set default and set splash screen calls, they store their data in a little eeprom chip on the module which is rated for 1 Million write cycles. With our normal gui tools it's virtually impossible wear out that little chip, doing 1M writes from code? couple of minutes at best.

Fiery
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Re: DriverCore SDK

Post by Fiery »

Thank you. The software I'm working on will not modify or alter the default settings. I just want to detect the default values to make sure the software restores them before exiting, since as it seems, when you close a session, the driver will not revert the LCD backlight and contrast settings back to their default values for some reason.

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