Altia Showcases GUI Solutions and Altia CloudWare™ at Embedded World 2023

Altia, a leading provider of user interface design and development software, is proud to announce its participation in Embedded World Expo 2023. This premier international trade fair and conference for embedded systems will take place in Nuremberg, Germany from March 14 to 16, 2023.

Visitors to the Altia booth will have the opportunity to see live demos of Altia graphical user interfaces (GUIs) at work with a variety of embedded ecosystem partners—including Android, Green Hills Software, Imagination Technologies, Infineon, NXP, Qualcomm, Renesas, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. All are invited to visit and speak with Altia experts about how the company’s solutions can help them create visually stunning and highly functional user interfaces for their embedded systems. Around the show, Altia GUIs will be demonstrated by partners as well.

“We are excited to be a part of Embedded World Expo 2023 and to showcase our industry-leading software to the global embedded systems community,” said Jason Williamson, Altia Vice President of Marketing. “With Altia, our customers create intuitive user interfaces that set their products apart in a competitive market. Furthermore, they have the flexibility to scale their Altia GUIs from low- to high-power hardware and even switch to less expensive or more readily available hardware mid-production.”

At the expo, the Altia team will be demonstrating Altia CloudWare™, the newest product in Altia’s GUI development software lineup. This cloud-based Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) solution, is available to companies developing embedded graphical user interfaces for production devices. CloudWare™ allows GUI developers to remotely access and pair Altia’s software with popular embedded hardware to create a test drive experience for their GUI from anywhere in the world.

Visitors to the Embedded World 2023 parallel conferences are invited to learn more about Altia CloudWare™ in presentations by Jeff Stewart, Altia Director of Global Sales Engineering, at Electronic Displays 2023 Conference on Wednesday, March 15 at 2:20 PM and Thursday, March 16 at Embedded World 2023 Conference at 5:00 PM.

Find Altia in Hall 4, Booth 4-201 at the Embedded World Expo 2023. Attendees are encouraged to schedule a meeting at the show or visit Altia’s booth to learn more about the company’s products and services and to see live demos of its software in action.

Altia Launches CloudWare™ to Enable Simplified, Faster Embedded GUI Development

Altia CloudWare™, a cloud-based Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) solution, is now available to all companies developing embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for production devices. The newest product in Altia’s GUI development software suite, CloudWare™ allows GUI developers to remotely access and pair Altia’s graphical user interface software with popular embedded hardware to create a test drive experience for their GUI from anywhere in the world.

Officially launched at CES 2023 and previewed prior to the show with key partners and customers, Altia CloudWare™ is already being recognized as a game-changing solution for improved collaboration, fast access to production hardware and simplified hardware testing to find the right-sized hardware for a GUI project.

“At Altia, we work with companies developing graphical displays for production and we learn a lot about the challenges they have experienced in previous projects. It’s our mission is to make embedded GUIs easy, so we created CloudWare™ to simplify benchmarking, testing and running GUI designs on any supported hardware from anywhere in the world,” stated Mike Juran, Altia CEO. “With the prevalence of distributed teams, this new tool also enables immediate collaboration with a unified hardware-software stack. GUI teams will turn months of collaboration time into minutes with CloudWare™.”

“This hardware-in-the-cloud solution offered by Altia will enable our customers to rapidly evaluate NXP® Semiconductors’ high-performance MCUs and MPUs and make it easy for them to choose from the wide range of NXP devices available for their GUI-based products,” said Jeff Steinheider, Vice President and General Manager, Industrial Edge, NXP. “The production-proven pairing of Altia GUI software with i.MX 8QuadMax in the cloud is a major advance in HMI development. With coming support for i.MX RT1170 and i.MX 93 families, our customers will be able to quickly and easily explore our broad portfolio to find an optimal solution for their needs.”

“Altia CloudWare™ is more than just a product we’re offering to customers. As a global company, we have engineers all over the world who are actively using this tool for our own demo and product development,” stated Mike Morgan, Altia Director of Product Delivery. “Not only has CloudWare™ enabled us to troubleshoot our GUI development in real time, but it makes our engineering team members even more productive and successful. We’re collaborating more effectively and with greater certainty because we are developing and testing for the exact same hardware.”

Altia CloudWare™ is now available. To request your demo, visit www.altia.com/cloudware.

About Altia

Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final production code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process enabling clear team communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs and radios to thermostats, washing machines and medical devices. Our mission is to get the best automotivemedical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest cost hardware.

Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Renault, Magneti Marelli, Nippon Seiki, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, NordicTrack and many others.

For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected].

Follow Altia on LinkedInTwitter and YouTube.

Altia Solves GUI Development Challenges with New Hardware-in-the-Cloud Solution

Altia is proud to announce Altia CloudWare™, a cloud-based Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) solution that allows graphical user interface (GUI) developers to pair Altia’s production-proven graphical user interface software with popular embedded hardware to create a test drive experience for their GUI from anywhere in the world. Altia will showcase this new product at CES 2023 – January 5-8 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Altia’s real-world understanding of the challenges of embedded system setup, configuration and validation inspired the development of Altia CloudWare™,” stated Michael Hill, Altia Vice President of Engineering. “We wanted to give our users the ability to rapidly access embedded systems as if they are sitting on their own desks—without the hassle associated with hardware and software management. We have achieved this with CloudWare™.”

What challenges does Altia CloudWare™ solve? As embedded GUI developers face incredibly long lead times for test hardware, Altia CloudWare™ enables access to test hardware in minutes. With multiple platforms available, GUI teams can pair their GUIs with the hardware of their choice to benchmark and test their project for best performance. Distributed GUI team members work with the same hardware-software stack—eliminating risk of disparate software versioning, configuration or compiler installation. Additionally, because the hardware is in the cloud, there is no loss of productivity while teams wait for test hardware to manufacture and ship. Instead, teams can begin development now with their selected CloudWare™ platform. Altia CloudWare™ enables GUI design teams to meet their product development schedules so that, when production hardware is available, their GUI will be ready to deploy.

The Altia team will demonstrate Altia CloudWare™ at their Renaissance Hotel exhibitor suite at CES 2023. CES attendees interested in a demo of Altia CloudWare™ can request a meeting with Altia at www.altia.com/ces. Not attending CES? Sign up to see CloudWare™ on our website.

About Altia

Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final production code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process enabling clear team communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs and radios to thermostats, washing machines and medical devices. Our mission is to get the best automotivemedical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest cost hardware.

Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Renault, Magneti Marelli, Nippon Seiki, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, NordicTrack and many others.

For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected].

Follow Altia on LinkedInTwitter and YouTube.

 

Designing GUIs for Microcontroller Units

“You get what you pay for” isn’t always true. When designing a graphical user interface (GUI) and producing a human-machine interface (HMI), the goal is always to get more than you pay for. Microcontroller unit-based systems (MCUs) are less complex and expensive than systems on chips (SoCs) because they offer less functionality. This doesn’t always mean sacrificing quality to cut costs, though, and it’s entirely possible to deliver a smartphone-caliber GUI on inexpensive hardware.

Microcontroller units keep bill of materials (BOM) costs low, offer relatively small sizes and have lower requirements for power and resources. Despite the relative simplicity of MCUs compared to SoCs (and sometimes because of it), product teams can still achieve excellent user interface (UI), user experience (UX) and graphics with MCUs.

Considerations and Challenges

The most relevant focus is typically on delivering an attractive, shiny, modern GUI on an MCU. Because MCUs are simpler from an architectural standpoint than an SoC, they offer fewer internal resources. The challenge lies in making the most of the limited resources of an MCU to develop a useful HMI. Identifying and overcoming obstacles is made possible by thoughtful requirements gathering and mapping those requirements to the available MCU resources.

The costs of engineering, production and maintenance are key considerations at the start of the requirements gathering phase, as well as throughout the entire GUI development process. The microcontroller itself is a significant part of the BOM cost, but answering the following questions will help teams navigate the complexity of an embedded GUI:

  • How many unique GUI screens and screen templates do we need?
  • How many images do we need—and in which file types?
  • Which languages and fonts do we need for internationalization?
  • Which animations or transitions do we need to support?
  • What kind of display are we working with (in terms of width, height, pixels and color depth)?
  • Do we need to provide updates or over-the-air (OTA) programming?
  • How and where will we store the application, assets and data?

With this list, you can derive a list of requirements for your GUI which must then be mapped onto the available resources of the MCU.

Solving the memory problems that plague MCU-based GUI designs can be a challenge. The balance between assets mapped to Flash and RAM consumed at runtime will impact asset management and GUI performance. Flash memory is great for content that doesn’t need to be refreshed, like your code and constant data. RAM is ideal for dynamic content, especially content that must be accessed, read and written frequently. Unfortunately, RAM is more expensive and requires continuous power supply.

Performance and access speed are vital to the overall quality of the UI and UX. Altia’s DeepScreen code generation architecture helps right-size frame buffers and control the color format of the graphical assets to reduce memory bandwidth. Altia DeepScreen supports hardware layers when available on the hardware, so it’s possible to make updates on dynamic content layers while keeping other layer graphics static—further reducing the system load like dynamic memory footprint.

Automatic code generation solutions like Altia DeepScreen offer advantages over hand-coding, which often becomes a nightmare when maintaining a GUI.

Benefits of Using Altia with Microcontroller Unit GUIs

Teams can use Altia’s GUI editor and model-based development process to improve collaboration. Once the design looks good, code generation brings it to life almost instantly. Beyond the improved collaboration, this yields three primary benefits:

  1. Code Size Optimization – Getting the code as small as possible helps stay within the confines of an MCU’s limited memory resources. For example, reducing memory helps draw less power to make the battery life as long as possible.
  2. Production Costs and Maintenance Costs – Easing the requirements for memory and power helps keep the BOM cost low. Easier printed circuit board (PCB) layouts might reduce costs when working with suppliers.
  3. Speed Optimization – A slow GUI is a bad GUI, and high latency can devastate UX. The combination of well-balanced GUI software with highly performant code and optimized graphical assets is the key to making a great first impression on customers and users.

These are three top reasons teams trust Altia to help them develop revolutionary GUIs. For example, the team at Tandem Diabetes Care developed software to deliver a full-color touchscreen GUI that runs for a week on a small rechargeable battery. The team at Cypress (now Infineon) successfully brought rich graphics to automotive displays with HMI code generation support for MCUs. Deploying GUIs for microcontroller unit-based GUIs is part of Altia’s DNA. This is why our solution is a top choice for embedded GUIs for displays of all sorts—from cost-efficient MCUs to cutting edge, high-power SoCs—all with a common design solution.

Why Altia for Embedded GUIs on Microcontroller Units?

Altia is a concept-to-code graphics solution with everything you need to design, develop and deploy GUIs on MCUs. You can use your favorite graphics tool to create artwork. Then use Altia’s GUI development software to bring your user interface to life on a bare-metal deployment or any MCU-compatible operating system (like FreeRTOS) with only a few clicks. The model-based workflow is straightforward enough to allow for quick prototyping, ongoing user testing and fast iterations to improve UX.

MCU-Minded Architecture

Because Altia’s code generator puts out optimized code, everything is lightweight enough for your microcontroller unit. You can even test performance during development because Altia DeepScreen automatically generates code. Our DeepScreen solution is specifically architected to make the most of the features of selected hardware (including those resource-constrained MCUs), making all this hardware (and more) work smarter.

Versatility

We continue to extend the range of code generation support to different types of MCUs to provide options for overcoming a chip shortage or other supply chain challenges. If you need to make a pivot or even create a GUI to work across multiple hardware configurations, DeepScreen gives you the flexibility to do so. Your GUI model is portable enough to go from microcontroller unit to microprocessor unit or vice versa for a new or next-generation product.

Power

The Altia Tool Chain is compatible with the range of MCU-based embedded graphics applications. The mission is to deliver the best-performing GUI possible on the lowest-cost hardware. That said, the software editor and code generator are advanced enough to provide advanced graphics with sophisticated graphics while 3D GPUs make their way into cost-efficient, smaller MPUs or when a state-of-the-art SoC is firing a GUI application.

Altia is in the business of helping companies get high-impact GUIs onto processers with just about any level of power. Many product teams come to us because they’ve never considered MCU-based GUIs or have never selected hardware. In those cases, our Kickstart Services help teams select hardware and optimize graphics accordingly.

Altia’s software and services are designed to support every step of the product journey, from concept to production. Reach out today to learn more or get started.

 

Altia Workflow | From Pixels to Production Hardware

Designed into over 100 million devices, companies all over the world trust Altia to get their best-looking, best-performing GUIs to market. 

There are many reasons why Altia is GUI tool of choice for developers of all sorts of devices—automotive, medical, consumer and more. One of the top reasons is our streamlined workflow. Altia’s toolchain not only reduces the overall time to market with new GUI projects, but our software also gives companies the capability to turn their artist’s beautiful 2D and 3D artwork into a working GUI model and then deliver that same model all the way to production hardware.

Want to see how simple developing and deploying GUIs with Altia can be? Check out our latest video which shows the journey from graphics in Photoshop through to production hardware.

Would you like to meet with our GUI experts to discuss your next embedded display project and learn more about how Altia will help you get your product to market quickly? We invite you to schedule a demo with us today!

Meet Altia Design 13.3—Live Webinar

How do you create high impact GUIs even faster? Altia’s Director of Product Marketing, Jeff Urkevich, and Tim Day, Altia Design Product Manager, will show you how with a live webinar featuring Altia Design 13.3, the latest release of our GUI editor.

All are invited to join us on Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 10 AM Eastern.

In this presentation, we will offer a first look at the top five new features in Altia Design 13.3.

  • Programmable Scene Node
  • Differential 3D Import
  • Composite Timelines
  • Blend Animations
  • Responsive Layout

Altia Design 13.3 is rich with in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) design power as well as updates to make our customers’ experience with Altia easier and more pleasing than ever before. We can’t wait to show you Altia Design 13.3 in action!

(Are you unable to join us? Make sure to sign up anyway! We’ll send you a recording after the live event.)

 

 

Altia Releases Altia Design 13.3

Altia, an international leader in GUI design and development tools, today announced the release of Altia Design 13.3, the company’s flagship editing suite for the creation of embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

The centerpiece of the Altia tool suite, Altia Design, allows GUI designers to turn static digital graphics into fully functional GUI prototypes—preparing graphics for code generation with Altia DeepScreen. This tool chain is used by professionals around the world in automotive, medical, industrial and consumer goods applications to get artists’ assets from third party design tools like Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, Maya and more onto production hardware.

Altia Design 13.3 takes GUI development to the next level with powerful new features, like:

  • Programmable Scene Node, which allows developers to inject their own 3D content into a 3D scene; ideal for integration of mapping applications and ADAS
  • Differential 3D Import, which gives users the capability to replace geometry in the scene without replacing or deleting any of the customization/animation already done in Altia
  • Composite Timelines, which lets users create parent and child timelines – letting users control the sequence of child timelines by the parent
  • Blend Animations, which allows for seamless transition between two complex, independent animations
  • Responsive Layout, which allows developers to set rules for objects and design a GUI once to accommodate for a variety of screen sizes and resolutions

Also included in Altia Design 13.3 are important font module updates as well as enhancements for workflow, user interface and user experience.

“As embedded displays become increasingly pervasive across products in all industries, the need to inform and engage our devices users with 3D graphics and sophisticated animations is becoming an unspoken requirement,” noted Jeff Urkevich, Director of Product Marketing for Altia. “Altia Design 13.3 is packed with excellent features to empower our customers to design these graphics with ease.”

“The features and improvements in Altia Design 13.3 enable some very exciting opportunities for our customers’ next generation GUIs,” added Tim Day, Altia Product Manager. “With this release, we’ve added key in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) design power as well as updates to make our customers’ experience with Altia easier and more pleasing. As an Altia user myself, I am really excited about Version 13.3.”

Altia Design 13.3 is immediately available. Altia customers interested in upgrading to Version 13.3 should email their local FAE team or contact [email protected]. Designers and product developers interested in bringing their next generation GUIs to life with Altia can request a demo of Altia Design 13.3 today.

About Altia

Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final product code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process for clear communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs, and radios to thermostats, washing machines and healthcare monitors. Our mission is to get the
best automotivemedical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest- cost hardware.

Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Renault, Magneti Marelli, Nippon Seiki, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, NordicTrack and many others.

For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected]. Follow Altia on LinkedInTwitter and YouTube.

See 9-Slice Object in Action

Altia Design now includes the 9-Slice Object—a part of the Altia Design model library. The 9-Slice Object allows for smart scaling of GUI elements, preserving the integrity of images when resized.

The 9-Slice Object is a big timesaver. Designers can create graphics with 9-slice behavior in just seconds. Plus, by they only need to create a single graphic for a resizable widget. Since there are fewer images that need to be updated when changes are needed, designers also save time on changes. They also save memory, since fewer images in the GUI model means less memory consumed on hardware.

Developers can apply this new feature to GUI elements like buttons, sliders, scroll bars, text inputs, progress bars and background graphics.

Check out 9-Slice Object in action in this Altia Design feature video.

Interested in upgrading to the latest release of Altia Design, which includes 9-Slice Object and many more powerful features? Contact your local FAE or email [email protected].

Design Techniques for Optimizing Graphical User Interfaces for Embedded Devices

Designing high-quality graphical user interfaces (GUI) for devices with hardware constraints can be difficult. But this article demonstrates some ways to maximize design efficiency to make it easier. More efficient GUIs use less memory, CPU and GPU power when handling moving parts and animation, and allow the designer more room to be creative with their designs, instead of worrying about their hardware constraints.

Design with common elements

The example below shows a simple menu screen with some common elements:

  • Each ICON_X is a button that would change the GUI to a different colored screen.
  • The HOME button returns the GUI to the home screen.
  • The HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS element remains in the upper right corner for all screens.
  • The ICON_X buttons and HOME button remain in the same location regardless of which ICON_X buttons selected.

Developer blog series_1

If a GUI developer were to design a menu layout by copying and pasting the “TimeAndIconBanner” element (the top bar displaying HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS, and the bottom bar displaying the Icon Buttons) for each of the screens in this GUI, the result is several duplicate objects in the GUI model. In the image below, each Card in the Deck Object that makes up the “IconScreens” contains the same TimeAndIconBanner element.

The TimeAndIconBanner element is a part of each individual screen under IconScreens, and the multiple instances of TimeAndIconBanner require a redraw of that element every time the screen is changed, resulting in unnecessary RAM and CPU usage.

To optimize this design and others like it, designers should isolate the common elements, TimeAndIconBanner in this case, and move them to a single instance one level up, as shown below.

Only one TimeAndIconBanner element now lives at the same level as IconScreens. This hierarchy illustrates the most efficient arrangement of design components, resulting in a corresponding change in the z-order of these groups within Altia Design, meaning that the highest level TimeAndIconBanner group is shown above the lower IconScreens group on the display.

Design with moving parts

Consider an animated speedometer. If the GUI is designed such that the entire screen is redrawn, instead of just the needle, more memory will be required for this GUI. Maintaining the static background image and animating only the needle on top creates the most efficient and memory-saving design. Another place to squeeze out some extra performance can be in reducing your fps. Some animations may not require the hardware’s maximum frame rate to achieve a satisfactory smoothness, and with Altia Design its simple to experiment and find a lower fps that works in your design.

Simple spedometer

If you would like to learn more about how Altia can help you optimize your GUIs to deliver the best performance using the least memory and power, we invite you to schedule a demo with a member of our expert GUI team today.

 

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