Date: 03/05/2010

New GUI tool from Amulet offer smartphone-like graphics for embedded systems

Amulet Technologies has made available GEMstudio, a drag-and-drop GUI
development environment for creating high-end, color touchscreen human-machine-interfaces (HMI), with smartphone-like graphics, for 8-, 16-, and 32-bit bit embedded systems.
GEMstudio can be used by both graphic designers and software engineers. It integrates tools for visual layout, interactive PC based simulation, and programming of the flash memory in the target embedded hardware. GEMstudio can program the entire GUI directly into flash memory on the target embedded hardware.

Drag-and-drop Design - GUI control and system I/O functions are implemented by dragging "widgets" from a pull-down menu to the GUI design screen. There are eighteen widgets that include check boxes, bar graphs, buttons, sliders, dynamic images, function buttons, image bars, image, Amulet Technologies, LLC 2 sequences, line plots, line graphs, linear gauges, lists, numeric fields, PWMs, radio button, scribble (for drawing or signatures), and string fields. Each widget has a list of parameters ranging from font and color to system function calls or writing values to SRAM. All widgets may be customized.

With GEMstudio, a high-end GUI can be added to a legacy or new 8- or 16-bit embedded system design without altering any of the embedded system hardware or software because a GEMstudio GUI executes on Amulet's GUI OS IC. Amulet's GUI OS IC operates independently of the embedded control system and connects to it in the same way as the legacy mechanical interface. With Amulet's GUI OS IC, there are no royalties, and no need to migrate the design to ARM9/11 based system.

Price: GEMStudio is available now for $499. Amulet's GEM Graphical OS Chip is available now and is priced at $6.72 in quantities of 100k units. The chip includes the GUI OS, which is royalty-free. LCD Evaluator Kits are available for $199, plus the price of the display. Production quantities of Amulet's GUI OS boards, GEMexpress, are available now and are priced at $69 in quantities of 5K units.