First of all, thank you so much to all who have partaken in the 2022 survey, up to now! Those who haven't yet may do so here. The idea is for us to know better what our readers do with their Nextion HMIs and what they are interested in. Some of the replies I read were a huge surprise for me. The smaller (4.3" and 5") Intelligent P series are obviously more widespread than I thought. You may thus expect more example projects for these devices over the next year! Now, let's come to today's topic: Mentioned as a point of interest by more than 30% of the survey replies, it's thus the first of the "you asked for it" chapters. Since I drew already first parallel lines between Nextion and Arduino GPIO in this article last November, I owed you this follow-up which makes the jump from theory to practice, anyway.

In many parts of the world, towards the end of the civil year, people celebrate some various festivities, depending on their history, culture and tradition. While during the whole year, I write articles for this blog, often heavily loaded with theory and complex code, always with some pedagogic goals in mind, I thought that it was time to make an exception and to present my dear readers with something just ludic (but not ludicrous!) which would allow them to have some fun with their Nextion HMI displays.

Inspired by a user's questions in the Nextion forums, I thought it'd be a good idea to write this small 24h countdown timer and to explain step by step, how this can be achieved with a minimum of resource (RAM/Flash) consumption and a minimum of screen estate. To show all details and caveats, I decided to write today's demo project for the Nextion Basic or Discovery HMI displays. The latter is less expensive and at the same time more powerful, thus it should be preferred for new developments. Both have one thing in common: they don't have an integrated RTC (real time clock), so we'll have to deal with a timer component, but it allows relatively precise operation when its strong and weak points are known, thus, please, continue to read...

After having discussed the theory of file based databases in the last article, it's time to demonstrate what can be done with coding only in Nextion language and using the FileBrowser, FileStream, and DataRecord components. And this article will also tell about some actual limits of this approach. But nevertheless, today's project has become a nice and (partly) flexible viewer for .csv files on the SD card.

The Nextion Intelligent P-Series HMI displays become more and more popular because these have much more horsepower under the hood, are available in multiple sizes from 4.3" to 10.1", with a capacitive (more comfortable and multi-touch capable) or a resistive (more robust in rough RF environments) touch engine, and most of them can be ordered boxed in a hobbyist and maker friendly easy to mount housing with an integrated speaker. Due to the much more powerful integrated processor and the bigger memory, the Nextion firmware offers also additional components and functions. But up to now, these are not often mentioned in Nextion-related forums and groups. Thus, I decided to write about the FileStream component which allows random read/write access to files on the SD card or in a reserved area of the RAM. But this time I want to go beyond simple text and ini files like in the demo project in this article and discover together with my dear readers how database tables can be handled.