Home of picoTK !

The small footprint C GUI kit for embedded systems

picoTK News

07-Oct-2007: Corrected no longer valid link to CVS repository section.

17-Feb-2002: Added Contributions section.

03-Dec-2000: Version 0.03 of picoTK is out. Download it here. Features added since last release:

VGA VESA linear frame buffer modes, which give higher resolution color modes on current VGA cards. Added a color version of the self booting demo floppy. This demo can be used to check wether the VGA card support these modes.

You can look into the latest README and CHANGELOG releases by using the CVS web interface.

20-Nov-2000: Revised HOWTO available. Now including picoTK API documentation. Read it On-Line or download it in various formats (PDF, PS, DVI and ASCII).

18-Nov-2000: Version 0.02 of picoTK is out. This release is a major improvement over 0.01. Download it here. The following features have been added since the last release:

Added HOWTO containing information on how to install picoTK and getting started with the RTEMS / picoTK combination
Generic drivers for 1, 4 and 8 bit per pixel color depth
Generic frame buffer emulator for simulation under X-Windows. Supporting 1, 4 and 8 bit per pixel modes
Readily compilable RTEMS demo

This shows a PicoTK demo screen snapshot, showing a Linux pinguin
pixmap, and a picoTK terminal box on 320x300 pixels

What is picoTK ?

picoTK is a GPL licensed small footprint C GUI toolkit for embedded systems. It readily works with the RTEMS real time kernel - its minimum complexity and OS independency makes a port to any operating system easy. It is not comparable featurewise to real full blown windowing toolkits like nanoX or Qt/Embedded; but serves the needs for simple memory mapped graphic presentation. picoTK features:

Draw graphical primitives: points, lines, texts (different fonts, fixed and proportionally spaced using any X-Windows font ), filled rectangles, pixmaps
Driver is easily adaptable to "homebrew" embedded display hardware based on memory-mapped framebuffer
Generic drivers for 1, 4 and 8 bit per pixel color depth. Readily supporting VGA mode 0x11 (640x480x2), VGA mode 0x13 (320x200x8) and the VESA linear frame buffer modes (480x640x8 to 1280x1024x8) on graphic cards, which support VBE2.0 or higher.
Framebuffer emulator (fbe) for Linux using shared memory IPC. This is used for the development of the toolkit and can be used for the development of your application as well. That is you can have a simulation version of your application that run under Linux - and look at its emulated screen. Than you can cross-compile the same application for the target system.
Tool "fontripper" for converting X11 fonts into picoTK fonts. Use "ppmripper" for converting ppm portable pixmaps into picoTK pixmaps. Fonts and Pixmaps are encoded into linkable binaries, i.e. the system will be compiled into a single binary and does not require to have a filesystem.
Together with RTEMS (www.oarcorp.com) you can have a nice embedded system graphical output solely using GNU technology.
Use Linux as a development host for cross-compiling and as an emulation environment.
Allows easy adaption/porting to your favorite operating system or hardware architecture.

Status

Right now, it prints 'Hello, world!', but someday, it will be an air traffic control system.
-- Jeff Covey, "How to write a great freshmeat submission"

I think its quite usable now. Things which might be added in the future:

Support for color pixmaps (currently only 1 bit deep pixmaps are supported).
Support for drawing circles.

Download Source & Documentation

HOWTO: Download documentation as plain ASCII, DVI, PS, PDF or browse HOWTO online.

picotk-0.03.tgz (40 KByte): Source tarball for Linux

Download Demo Floppyimages

The following floppy images demonstrate some picoTK features. These images are, when copied to a floppy disk, readily bootable. They use LILO, RTEMS and picoTK.

picodemo1.bin (80 KByte): Demo using VGA Mode 0x11: 640x480x1bpp (b&w)

picodemo8.bin (80 KByte): Demo using VGA VESA Mode 0x101: 640x480x8bpp (256 colors)

The color demo does only run on (newer) VGA cards supporting VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) Version 2.0 or higher. If no such card is found a message "You passed an invalid mode number" is issued.

Copy either file to a floppy using the floppy raw device, e,g.:

cp picodemo1.bin /dev/fd0.

Contributions

picoDrawCircleRaw.c draws circles using integer arithmetic only. Contributed by Thomas Hegenhahn.

Sourceforge project picoTK

CVS web interface
Project page
Feedback welcome. Email the author Thomas Gallenkamp

Embedded Systems Links

Real-time kernels

RTEMS Real-time executive for multiprocessor systems