eCosPro-PEG Graphics User Interface Suite

PEG logo

Need a GUI for your eCos based device? eCosPro-PEG is a suite of graphics user interface packages that simplify the development and deployment of intuitive and visually appealing user interfaces for your eCosPro-based embedded device.

The suite is designed to meet widely varying power, performance and memory requirements, helping to reduce product development risk, lower in-house development costs and accelerate time to market.

The PEG (Portable Embedded GUI) suite of packages are the leading choice for embedded GUI implementations. They have been used in hundreds of product designs, including digital audio, telephones, cameras, printers, medical devices, telematics, industrial and aeronautics.

In common with eCos, PEG is small, fast, robust and easily ported to different hardware. It is capable of supporting a wide range of graphics display hardware types as well as touch screens and other input devices. Its code footprint is typically between 42KiB and 96KiB, enabling its effective use in small memory, low power and cost constrained designs.


Example product using PEG Plus GUI
  Example Raymarine product using PEG Plus GUI
The eCosPro-PEG suite packages include everything necessary for the development of embedded GUI's: standard eCos EPK package installation, full library source code, example application programs, drivers for many common graphics and input hardware devices - including the eCosPro frame buffer driver, GUI development tools, documentation and support.

The supplied GUI tools enable development on either Windows and Linux hosts. Custom PEG windows, dialogs, bitmaps and fonts can be automatically generated from these tools and integrated with the eCosPro run-time, utilising the eCosPro Eclipse-based IDE for application development and remote debugging.

Three PEG packages are available to select between: PEG Lite, PEG Plus and PEG Pro. These vary in terms of their resource requirements, functionality and cost.



PEG Lite

PEG Lite
★ The simplest and most lightweight version of PEG
★ Free source-code license on NXP silicon
★ Monochrome and up to 16-bit color displays
★ Basic widgets
★ Dual-language capable
★ Typical code footprint: 42–52KB

Effective Economy

PEG Lite provides a comprehensive set of entry level components to create compelling graphical user interfaces. PEG Lite is a low cost solution that is available for all embedded controllers, including free complementary licensing options for NXP microcontrollers.

PEG Lite is small, fast and portable. As the entry point into the PEG family, PEG Lite enables developers to create GUI applications that naturally migrate to PEG Plus and/or PEG Pro as needs grow. Its flexible architecture also makes it easily extensible to allow the application developer to exceed the market demands for device GUI presentation. PEG Lite's modular design also means it easily scales from small, monochromatic screens to large, full color displays.

PEG Lite is delivered with full source code, complete documentation, and development tools compatible with PEG Plus and PEG Pro. Also, knowing PEG Lite is supported by the same developers which designed and implemented the library brings peace of mind when questions arise.


PEG PLus

PEG Plus
★ Builds on the feature set of PEG Lite
★ Multiple window updates
★ Alpha-blended images
★ Custom widget integration
★ Dynamic themes
★ Multi-language capable
★ Typical code footprint: 48-72KB

Lightweight Power

PEG Plus is small, fast, and easily ported to virtually any hardware configuration capable of supporting graphical output. PEG Plus delivers exceptional visual appeal utilizing an intuitive and powerful API that allows complete customization of the graphical appearance.

PEG Plus is our most versatile GUI software available to real-time embedded system developers. The development tools, documentation, and support you will require for creating a graphical user interface on an embedded system are included with the PEG Plus library and WindowBuilder Development Tool.

PEG Plus is delivered with full source code, a large set of example programs, and hardware interface support for a broad array of popular target systems. PEG Plus will run "out of the box" on nearly any embedded system, while thorough documentation and support insure you are up and running on your embedded target quickly.


PEG Pro

PEG Pro
★ The most feature rich version of PEG
★ True anti-aliasing
★ Transparent text with drop shadow effects
★ Blending of transparent images and windows
★ Gradient manager
★ Screen transition effects
★ Typical code footprint: 64-96KB

Abundant Possibilities

PEG Pro offers developers of embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs) a proven software solution for creating complex, high color-depth embedded graphic applications. It enables the design of sophisticated embedded graphics by supporting the key features required for interactive devices such as navigation systems, gaming systems and medical electronics. PEG Pro accelerates product delivery by providing high quality visual development tools and the ability to begin development on a Windows or Linux platforms.

Key features include unlimited graphics layers, per-pixel and per-layer alpha blending, bitmap rotation and scaling, screen transitions, text rotation and complete anti-aliasing of all drawing primitives. In addition, PEG Pro provides run-time selection of themes to allow end-users to tailor their experience. PEG Pro supports a wide range of color depths up to 32 bits-per-pixel (bpp). PEG Pro includes a broad set of basic control types such as buttons, text gadgets, animations, menu-list display and bitmap display objects. All of these display widgets can be fully customized, both at compile time and at runtime. PEG Pro offers advanced classes such as treeview, spreadsheet and charting classes.

PEG Pro GUI elements can be fully tailored, allowing OEMs to create user interfaces that maintain and accurately reflect the company's brand image — not one which another company has selected for you. PEG Pro graphics can be overlaid on real-time video or alpha blended using multiple graphical layers. The graphics core is easily configured for a wide variety of display resolutions, orientations and color depths. Anti-aliased fonts and true anti-aliased line drawing allow you to deliver high-quality interfaces expected by today's users. Industry leading multi-lingual application support includes full Unicode and SJIS character encoding support, and string table editing and string resource file generation facilities incorporated within the WindowBuilder StringTableEditor.

PEG Pro is written specifically for the embedded systems market, meaning that the value of every feature is weighed against the code size and performance requirements for that feature. A typical full-featured GUI requires a PEG Pro footprint of roughly 64-96K code, 8K stack and 32K dynamic memory. Note this does not include application-specific files, but only the graphics core itself. PEG Pro is fully integrated with RTOS messaging, memory management and synchronization services to provide the lowest possible overhead and a true real-time multitasking GUI environment. PEG Pro input devices are interrupt driven, and again use RTOS services to communicate user input information to the graphical user interface. PEG Pro can also be configured to support multiple GUI tasks. These tasks can be of differing priorities and can each directly create, display and control any number of GUI windows or child controls.


PEG Graphics Suite Comparison
Peg LitePEG PlusPEG Pro
Color DepthMonochrome to 65K High ColorMonochrome to 16.7M True Color65K High Color to 16.7M True Color with Alpha
Custom Bitmap ElementsButtons and Images…adds Widgets and Animation
Predefined WidgetsText Button, Checkbox, Radio, Progress Bar, Slider, Dial, Scroll, Combo Box, ……adds, Windows, Charts, Spreadsheet, Tables, Tabs, Menu and Status Bars, ……adds gradients and transparency effects
Multilingual SupportDual LanguageFull Multi-lingual
Anti-AliasingSimple Anti-AliasingTrue Anti-Aliasing
Window BuilderFull WYSIWYG editor with integrated Font Capture and Image Converter
Additional Features Runtime themes/skins, Runtime image decoding…adds Swipe detection, Alpha blending


PEG GUI Development Tools Example PEG GUIs

Host based PEG development tools

Example eCosPro-PEG GUIs

eCosCentric For detailed technical information please read the PEG Product Brochure or browse Swell Software's website. Swell Software is a subsidiary of NXP. For information regarding pricing and services please contact us for a detailed discussion.

NXP

  Swell Software