[Lcd4linux-devel] Synchronised widget updates

[Martin Z. <co...@mz...>]

Hi!

I had a long train ride today and, after staring at the beautiful, 
snow-filled landscape for hours, had a go at synchronising widget 
updates.  I won't commit this to SVN before I have the all-go, though, 
as I don't know whether my patch might introduce a lag on some LCD 
updates and whether you actually want synchronised widgets.  That being 
said, the patch works flawless on the X display driver and my picoLCD 
256x64.

Here's what I did: I basically duplicated "timer.c" and "timer.h".  I 
also changed all the widgets to call "timer_add_widget()" instead of 
"timer_add()".  This function stores all the necessary callback data and 
allocates a new timer -- but only one timer for each update interval. 
This timer then regularly calls "timer_process_group()", which processes 
all widgets with the given update data.  This not only synchronises 
widgets, but also gets rid of a lot of unessesary timers.  Simple, but 
quite effective.

If you wish to, please run "lcd4linux" with the attached configuration 
file "synchronise.conf".  You will see a lot of icons that pop up and 
vanish rather irregularly.  After applying my patch, all boxes of a 
given update interval appear at once and vanish in the same way.

By the way, I added "timer_group.c" and "timer_group.h" to 
"Makefile.am", ran "./bootstrap", "./configure" and "make".  I hope that 
this was the correct thing to do -- I have never used "automake" 
before... ;)

Best regards,

Martin
-- 
www.mzuther.de
www.radix-musik.de