Real - time points plotting using opengl VC++ - opengl

I need suggestion on how to plot points real-time. Using OpenGL
Right now what am doing is loading the desired data from a csv to an array and plotting the points from there. This is working fine.
What I intend to do is, load such multiple csv's one by one at regular intervals of time, so that i can create a animation kind of output. I can do this but once the program plots the point by entering glutMainLoop();, it never gets out without closing opengl window. I want to load the 1st csv, show it in OpenGL window, then load the next csv and show the new set of points and so on.
If its difficult to comprehend, just see the image below
Just consider the red and blue points.Consider them as not actually moving but being plotted from an external data with each new postions loaded from the csv file. Hope its clear

[...] once the program plots the point by entering glutMainLoop();, it never gets out without closing opengl window.
freeglut extends glut by glutLeaveMainLoop and glutMainLoopEvent.
e.g.:
bool condtion = true;
while (condtion)
{
glutMainLoopEvent(); // handle the main loop once
glutPostRedisplay(); // cause `display` to be called in `glutMainLoopEvent`
condtion = ...;
}
Another option would be to use glutIdleFunc to do additional stuff. So it is not necessary to leave the glut main loop at all..

Related

Text deleted by backspace is not being updated on my arduino tft display (adafruit gfx library)

For university, we need to make a game in Unity that is controlled with an Arduino. My idea was a hacking game where the Arduino acts as the 'hacking device' when hacking something in the game. The arduino would have a screen and on that screen would be a basic command-line interface that lets me input simple commands to 'hack' but I've been having trouble regarding text and clearing it.
I've been able to use unity to send typed characters to the display as-well as a backspace function (pressing backspace would remove last character in the string)
I first had issue with clearing all the text when writing (calling tft.print doesn't clear any previous text). I was using fillScreen which was slow. I found out setTextColor had a second argument that let me just set all certain colored text to a different color. Setting it to black would essentially clear it.
This made it update pretty much instantly when writing to the screen but I now had a new issue, backspace would no longer would.
My understand is that when removing the character, it's color won't be updated when calling setTextColor leaving it on the screen until a restart/fillScreen is called.
I'm not really sure how to solve this and all google searches turn up little to no help.
Here's my code for updating the text:
void updateString(char c){
tft.setTextColor(WHITE,BLACK);
if(c!='<'){
//Add new character to end of string
str.concat(String(c));
}
else if(c=='<' && str.length()>2){
//Remove last character in string
str.remove(str.length()-1);
}
//Set cursor back to 0,0
tft.setCursor(0,0);
//Display text
tft.print(str);
}
I'd appreciate any help.
Maybe, use a similar function to tft.clear() each time you refresh the screen or you can draw a filled square of the background on the text so it looks like it has been erased then you rewrite the text.
Sounds like you are using proportionally-spaced fonts instead of the original classic fonts that ships with Adafruit_GFX. Historically, when using the default classic fonts one could set the background color option of the text to the same color as the background of the screen (usually black). This would overwrite the old screen contents with new data and work because the characters using the classic fonts are a uniform size. When using proportionally-spaced fonts, the background color option for the font is disabled by design.
This was presumably because of memory requirements and speed on slower AVR's. Regardless, when using proportionally-spaced fonts the background color feature won't work due to non-uniform sized characters overlapping the same regions as adjacent characters.
There are two work-arounds to this. Adafruit says in order to replace previously drawn text when using custom fonts you can either:
Use getTextBounds() to determine the smallest rectangle that encloses a
string and then erase that area using fillRect() prior to drawing
the new text. OR
Create an offscreen bitmap using GFXcanvas1 for a fixed size area,
draw the text in the GFXcanvas1 object and then copy to the screen
using drawBitmap().
Note that options 1 & 2 above are mutually exclusive. The second method requires more memory. The first method isn't perfect and produces some small amount of flicker, but is in general acceptable if coded carefully.
I hope that I have understood what the nature of your problem is and answered it in a satisfactory manner. If nothing else, at least now you know why custom font's will not work with the so called background color feature that works with the original 'classic' Adafruit fonts.
Nikki Cooper

Garbage on top of screen when displaying text over image in devkit pro

I am currently using the 16-bit libnds (Whith devkitpro) example as a basis and am trying to display text and the png background image on the same screen (in this example it is the top sceen). I am having a similar issue as this post.
I have garbage on the top of the screen (only ifconsoleInit(...) is called), similar to the first problem in the thread. The only problem is that I am displaying the background image in a different method so the fixes they made in that thread did not apply to this.
All I am looking for is whether there is a way to fix the garbage on the top of the screen. If there is a more efficient/better way to display the image, I am willing to accept it, just I haven't found a detailed enough tutorial on how to load an image as a background without using this method. Any help would be appreciated. I will answer any further questions anyone has about what is not working.
You can find the project attached here.
Sorry for the long delay but there are a few issues with your code. The first is that in Mode 4 the only background that can be set up as a 16 bit bitmap is layer 3. http://answers.drunkencoders.com/what-graphics-modes-does-the-ds-support/
Next, the layers all share a single chunk of background memory and your garbage is coming from you overwriting part of the bitmap in video memory with the characters for the font and the map for the console background. A simple solution is to move the bitmap by settings its map base to 1. This offsets its in graphics memory by 16KB which leaves 16KB of room for your text layer (this only works because we cant display the entire 256x256 image on screen at once due the the resolution of the DS as 256x256x2bytes fills up all of memory bank A...to be more correct we should assign another memory bank to the main background...but since we cant see the bottom 70 or so lines of pixels of our image anyway its okay that they didnt quite make it into video memory).
libnds also has a macro to make finding the memory for your background a bit simpler called "bgGetGfxPtr(id)" which will get a pointer to your background gfx in video memory after you set it up so you dont have to try to calculate it via an offset from BG_GFX.
In all the changes to your code should look like this (I added a version of this to the libnds code faq at : http://answers.drunkencoders.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=289&action=edit&message=1)
int main(void) {
//Top screen pic init
videoSetMode(MODE_4_2D);
vramSetBankA(VRAM_A_MAIN_BG);
int bg = bgInit(3, BgType_Bmp16, BgSize_B16_256x256, 1,0);
decompress(drunkenlogoBitmap, bgGetGfxPtr(bg), LZ77Vram); //Displays/decompresses top image
//videoSetMode(MODE_4_2D);
consoleInit(0,0, BgType_Text4bpp, BgSize_T_256x256, 4,0, true, true);
iprintf("\x1b[1;1HThe garbage is up here ^^^^^.");
iprintf("\x1b[21;1HTesting the text function...");
while(1) {
swiWaitForVBlank();
scanKeys();
if (keysDown()&KEY_START) break;
}
return 0;
}

OpenGL window draws fine, but all the windows on top of my OpenGL window go black

I have an app that mixes OpenGL with Motif. The big main window that has OpenGL in it redraws fine. But, the sub windows sitting on top of it all go black. Specifically, just the parts of those subwindows that are right on top of the main window. Those subwindows all have just Motif code in them (except for one).
The app doesn't freeze up or dump core. Data is still flowing, and as text fields, etcetera of various subwindows get updated, those parts redraw. Dragging windows across each other or minimizing/unminimizing also trigger redraws. The timing of the "blackout" is random. I run the same 1-hour dataset every time and sometimes the blackout happens 5 minutes into the run and sometimes 30 minutes in, etc.
I went through the process of turning off sections of code until the problem stopped. Narrowed it down more and more and found it had to do with the use of the depth buffer. In other words, when I comment out the glEnable(GL_ENABLE_DEPTH_TEST), the problem goes away. So the problem seems to have something do with the use of the depth buffer.
As far as I can tell, the depth buffer is being cleared before redrawing is done, as it should. There's if-statements wrapped around the glClear calls, so I put messages in there and confirmed that the glClear of the depth buffer is indeed happening even when the blackout happens. Also, glGetError didn't return anything.
UPDATE 6/30/2014
Looks like there's still at least one person looking at this (thanks, UltraJoe). If I remember correctly, it turned out that it was sometimes swapping buffers without first defining the back buffer and drawing anything to it. It wasn't obvious to me before because it's such a long routine. There were some other minor things I had to clean-up, but I think that was the main cause.
How did you create the OpenGL window/context. Did you just get the X11 Window handle of your Motif main window and created the OpenGL context on that one? Or did you create a own subwindow within that Motif window for OpenGL?
You should not use any window managed by a toolkit directly, unless this was some widget for exclusive OpenGL use. The reason is, that most toolkits don't create a own sub-window for each an every element and also reuse parts of their graphics resources.
Thus you should create a own sub-window for OpenGL, and maybe a further subwindow using glXCreateWindow as well.
This is an old question, I know, but the answer may help someone else.
This sounds like you're selecting a bad visual for your OpenGL window, or you're creating a new colormap that's overriding the default. If at all possible, choose a DirectColor 24-plane visual for everything in your application. DirectColor visuals use read-only color cells, but 24 planes will allow every supported color to be available to every window without having to overwrite color cells.

Alternative approach to clearing graphics

i have been using cleardevice() to clear the graphics ... but it creates several problems
for eg .. i create a background but i have to clear some specific elements , then i have to use another user defined function drawb() which draws the background and simultaneously cleardevice();
creating a lot of problems
line(x,y,x1,y1); //suppose this line is to be erased
//but using cleardevice even clears the background
cleardevice();
drawb(); //to draw board or background
so i want to know an alternative approach(an approach to clear only the line not the background) (if it exists )
Once a line is drawn, there is no real way to remove it (except if you are drawing using XOR mode!). However, there are some thing you could do. You could render everything but the line in a page and store it there. Then, in another page you render everything, including the line. So if you want to undo the line, you just switch the page back.
An example:
setactivepage(0);
// draw stuff, including background
setactivepage(1);
// draw stuff, including background and line
setvisualpage(0); // no line visible
setvisualpage(1); // line visible
Also, if you want to reset the screen with a background, there is no need to do a cleardevice(), since the drawb() overwrites every pixel ayway.
You can first take the image before drawing the line by getimage()
and put that image on the line whenever you want to hide your image
This will not change your background and not flick it. putimage() can put the image.

Simulation making using MFC application

I am doing a simulation using MFC application (its a robot moving in a field) what happens is that the process behind calculates the position to quick where as drawing takes time so what I see ultimately is the robot at the end position no intermediate positions . But when I put AFXMessageBox then I can see all the position its been going through , Can you help me figure this out
Hina, What you need to do is move the complex calculation that calculates the position of the robot to a thread and keep the drawing of robot in your main thread. Then you need to communicate your current positions to the main thread and after the drawing invalidate your surface. This way you can see the positions updated frequently.
What happens when you display a message box is you are able to repaint the surface after the calculation.
You can fasten the drawing my using memory device context. In a nutshell you would do all the drawing on a bitmap in memory which will be fast. When it is all ready, you will print the final drawing on your display. This will be very fast and smooth.