The Sunday Blog: Optimized coding An example Besides, among others, blogging about Nextion, administrating the Nextion user

We have to admit, this is about a rather rare use case in the Western hemisphere, but it might happen that you have to design a Nextion HMI project requiring text input in Chinese. Since it's rather not possible to have an on-screen keyboard which displays 8273 characters of the Chinese gb2312 encoding, a different way, the so-called Pinyin input method was recently added to the Nextion Editor and firmware in the version 1.63.3. In today's article, we'll look deeper into that and try understanding what Pinyin is and how it works.

As announced a few weeks ago, we are now at a point where worldwide semiconductor and other materials shortages ask for more creativity from our side to maintain our LTA commitment. As it is actually very difficult to source reliably the MCU inside the smaller Standard (T) Series HMI displays, even when paying 10x the initial price, it was big time to think about a drop-in replacement for these which we can offer in big quantities and at a more reasonable price. That's why my Chinese colleagues "gave birth" to a new series of HMI displays, called "Discovery", available in 3 sizes: 2.4" and 2.8" with a 320 x 240px resolution, and 3.5" with a 480 x 320px resolution, just like the Standard or Basic (T) series.

In the past, we have already seen some of the astonishing graphic capabilities of the Nextion Intelligent Series HMI displays, for example on May, 10th, 2021. What we did not yet talk about in detail, was transparency and (with the help of a few lines of code) fading effects. So, let's have a closer look onto this! There is (as always) an example project and the code explained, so that you might then use these techniques in your own developments.

We, which means in this context, the Nextion developers, consultants, forum administrators, technical writers, and beta testers, are only normal human beings, like anyone else. Although we do our best, for example beta testing new versions of the Nextion editor, or developing example projects and code for this blog, to check and check again everything thoroughly, it happened (and will for sure happen in the future) that we oversee a little detail or a rare or specific use case. That's why we are happy with and grateful for our attentive readers and users! In this article, I will cite two examples of how our readers and users help us making a good product still better.

Sometimes, when developing a project, we discover that a specific functionality for our specific use case seems to be missing. As an experienced developer, you would think of solving this by quickly overloading a component object with new member variables and functions as you'd do for example in Java. But, unfortunately, the embedded MCU on the backside of our Nextion HMI display can not offer you enough space for code and variables on one side, and a full fledged object oriented runtime interpreter on the other side.  That does NOT mean that components can't see their functionality extended by user code. Although I showed you already last October how this can be done, extending a progress bar component into an animated progress bar, not everybody read this post or can adapt the procedure to another component.  So, today, let's have a look onto how to enhance the number component in combination with the on-screen keyboard, so that inputs can be limited between a minimum and a maximum.