Nextion News

First of all…

Whatever you are currently celebrating, Christmas, Hanukkah, Jul, Samhain, Festivus, or any other end-of-the-civil-year holidays, I wish you a good time!

This December 25th edition of the Nextion Sunday Blog won’t be loaded with complex mathematical theory or hyper-efficient but difficult to understand code snippets. It’s about news and information. Please read below…

Santa Claus has a Nextion Christmas Sale with up to 20% for you!

Just click on the picture above or this link to get $40 off on Nextion orders over $199 using the code NEXTIONXMAS before December 31! Even if you order from an opposite point of the globe, this might pay for shipping or even more. Or you might have some budget free to add the NEXTION MIDI I/O Interface to your order. Remember, from last July to September, there were many Sunday Blog posts with example code showing how your Nextion HMI could be easily transformed into a full-fledged MIDI controller, and that in autonomous mode without the need for an external MCU like an Arduino!

Santa Claus has also a heart for students!

The ITEAD Student 10% Discount Program is available to college students, educators, and academic research staff with an approved academic email address. It provides a discount for iTead products at the itead.cc website.

How to get this discount?

1.) Choose Product: Choose what you want to shop first.

2.) Apply Student Discount: Enter your student email in the student discount area of the shopping cart page to apply.

3.) Verify your status: You will receive a link with 10% discount for products on iTEAD by verifying your status.

4.) Get Discount: The student discount is valid within 1 year from the date you receive the student verification email.

Aren’t this great news?

Nextion Editor v 1.65.0 released!

The new Nextion Editor v 1.65.0 is now available! Just launch your Nextion Editor and follow the pop-up instructions which guide you through the update! This new version comes without whistles and bells – there are no exciting new components or attributes. But it fixes a few issues which most of us were even not aware because these happened only under very specific conditions.

For example, if you used multitouch on a capacitive screen and you had event code for the components in a TouchCap component and in each individual component at the same time and if you pressed and then released 5 components at exactly the same moment, only 4 would release and the 5th cause your code to hang. Another Example: Designing your GUI in the Nextion Editor and using the screen zoom at several values different from 100% and repositioning (moving) a component with the mouse would eventually change the moved component’s height or width by 1 px, due to rounding errors. And last but not least, again the TouchCap component, or better its Send component ID did not always work, even when the Send component ID of an individual component was checked.

These (and a few rare similar things) have now been fixed by my colleagues in China.

But there is one thing, you will see in every case: As you know, your Nextion HMI sends serial data at startup, to let an external MCU know that it has booted. First there are three 00 bytes, followed by the 3 x FF terminator bytes, then a 88 byte, again followed by 3 x FF. While being hard coded in earlier firmware versions, which could be highly annoying when using custom protocols and protocol reparse mode, this sequence has now become optional. When you open an older project or when you create a new one, you’ll find that the Editor has added the following line to program.s in order to maintain full backward compatibility:

printh 00 00 00 FF FF FF 88 FF FF FF

But, and this is the new and good thing, you may now just comment out or delete this line if this sequence is not needed in your setup – saving startup time, flash memory bytes, and in some cases not longer troubling your highly optimized custom protocol (long time readers know that the latter is one of my preferred tools)!

That’s it for today, now I let you update your Editor and check out everything. You have perhaps now a few days off or you may at least slow down a bit towards the end of the year – time to play with Nextion HMI or to place an order, benefitting from all the discounts mentioned above.

Happy Nextioning!

Comments, critics, suggestions? Just send me an email to thierry (at) itead (dot) cc! 🙂