At the end of the last blog article where we saw together how one could (almost) automatically add an animated status bar to each page of a Nextion HMI project, I promised you that it would still evolve by adding a menu to it. When I started developing it, I discovered so many amazing things, and I found ways to optimize several aspects, that it took much more time than foreseen, but finally, here we are! If you didn't already, you really should read the previous article and have a look onto its demo project code, to fully benefit from today's extensions.

The Nextion status bar - advanced programming The idea... ...which I had in mind was to create

Introduced with the Nextion Editor v 1.60.0 in early 2020 as a container for startup code, the program.s file allowed for the very first time to execute code before the startup page (which was always page 0) was loaded. Although we have been using it many times in our demo projects, and since every project compiled using Nextion Editor v 1.60.0 or newer makes use of it, even when you do not touch at it, I think that it's time to have a deeper look to get most out of it.

This is the third and last part of this article series where we wanted to have a deeper look on how to develop a Nextion project systematically, efficiently, and at a professional level. After we talked about gaming mathematics and win plans in the first part, and about animation and timing in the second part where I showed you already a raw proof of concept, it's now time to add a nice GUI and the credits handling, and to adapt and to assemble all the code snippets elaborated during the previous articles, and then, we'll be done!

Professional HMI project design Step 2: Animation and timing In my previous blog article, we started explaining

In the beginning, there is always an idea for a new project. The worst you can do at this very moment is to launch the Nextion editor and, if needed, the Arduino IDE, and start immediately coding... Before you do the first step, you have to know exactly where you want to go, says an old proverb. In this blog and the following over the next weeks, we'll look at how to define this "exactly where you want to go". The proceeding is quite similar to what you can see in cooking shows at the TV: They first think about what they'll cook, then they make sure that they have all required ingredients at hands, prepare and pre-process them, the famous "mise en place" before everything is added consecutively in an optimal order to the pot or pan, on the stove or in the oven, which is called the "assemblage"...