README

About
=====

    This is a little program I threw together to help evaluate different OLED
    displays and GUI layouts for them. Internally, it's comprised of 1 external
    widget and 3 of my own:

    QLedMatrix: I briefly contemplated writing my own widget to emulate the
    actual LED display, but thanks to a quick search I found one already written
    for me. Actually, I think the author, Pierre-Etienne Messier, did an amazing
    job! :-)

    SSD1306: A simulation of the OLED controller by the same name. This wraps
    Pierre-Etienne's QLedMatrix with the same interface as the real thing (see
    lines 46 thru 48). Unlike the real thing, you can resize the display
    dynamically at run-time. In the future I'd actually extend this model to
    include various timing and output features of the real controller, such as
    updating the pixels at the actual "clock-rate" and generating the "frame"
    signal for synchronizing writes to the device. (Hrm... I suppose I could
    even simulate the clock-rate of the SPI bus... hehe ;-)

    Graphics: Not wanting to draw just a single static bitmap to the display, I
    chose to implement a very basic (and very inefficient) graphics library. The
    library works directly on the same image format as the SSD1306's internal
    GDDRAM: each byte of a page corresponds to the 8 bit rows at that particular
    column. I implement the minimum set of operations I felt I would need to
    make a useful UI: Fill, Rect, Line, Arc and a convenience "Tab" function.

    Font_info: Shortly after completing the Tab function, I realized my UI would
    useless without some kind of font support ;-) I used Font Builder to convert
    some free fonts into rasterized images. This also generates an XML
    description file that lists all of the important metrics for each character
    of the font. I wrote a quick program to convert the png and XML of each font
    into a C source/header pair (encoded in the same format the graphics lib
    works on).


Copyright
=========

    Copyright (C) 2013 Josh Watts <josh@sroz.net> http://www.sroz.net/


License
=======

    QtLedTest is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.