Chinese New Year brings you a new sales offer, a new Nextion Editor release, and a new free software tool

First of all, I wish you a Happy Chinese New Year of the rabbit!

The sales offer

To celebrate the new year, Nextion has a New Year Sales Offer: BUY 2 GET 10% OFF ! Click here or on the picture just below to order online and use the code NEXTION2023 to get your 10% off:

The new Nextion Editor v. 1.65.1

Again, a new editor release ? You remember most probably that v. 1.65.0 had recently been released and I had written about it, here. While all the documented fixes and improvements work like a charm, another “under the hood” improvement optimizing the memory management in the Nextion’s firmware led in a few rare cases to a strange effect when using full screen pictures on the bigger 7″ and 10.1″ Nextion HMI displays: Everything compiled fine and looked well in the debugger/simulator, but once uploaded to the screen, no picture would be displayed but a “show picture error” message would appear.

Users could fix this quickly with a simple workaround, optimizing the compression settings of these full screen pictures in the picture resource pane, but it was neither comfortable nor intuitive to do so. Please accept the apologies of all beta testers (including myself) for having overseen this! But as the problem was discovered, our developer colleagues fixed it in a very short time, that’s why you get this new release only 4 weeks after the last one. In this new version, the compiler selects automatically and individually in real time the optimal image quality settings for least memory usage without any visual impact at each run, without affecting the original picture resource. That means that you may now compile the same HMI file several times for different display types and sizes without thinking about the picture resources, the compiled TFT file will always contain an error free and memory optimized version of your picture resource!

The new free software tool

Remember last week’s blog? I wrote about the DataRecord, one of the Nextion’s mightiest components, able to collect, to hold, and to display huge amounts of structured data. Structured data means that data is organized or subdivided in records or lines. The latter are again subdivided into fields or columns which makes it ideally suited for further processing with a spreadsheet tool like Excel. Unfortunately, the DataRecord Component holds its data in proprietary .data format files which can’t be read by common tools.

But fortunately, my Chinese colleagues had a solution in the drawer which I will now share with you: NextionDataBox.exe

The mandatory disclaimer: This tool comes without any warranty – use at your own risk!

It’s a very simple stand-alone application which doesn’t need any installation. The only downside is that the user interface is in Chinese. But you will see, that’s not a problem, it’s simple and highly intuitive:

Step 1: After downloading and unzipping, start NextionDataBox.exe. The interface will look like this:

Step 2: Click on the “File Open” button and navigate to the .data file, either from the SD card which you have taken off from the Nextion and inserted in your PC, or to the virtual SD card folder of the Nextion Editor Environment in case you worked with the simulator, and open it.

Step 3: Select the correct encoding (the one your Nextion HMI project was compiled with), so that your data will be exported correctly.

Step 4: Click the “Export to CSV” button, navigate to the target directory for your data export (I selected the Desktop), give your file a name and click on save.

Step 5: Find your exported data and open it in Excel, Notepad or any other software which can read .csv files. Thanks to VMware’s sync between my Windows and Mac file systems, I was even able to open it immediately with the “Numbers” app on the Mac!