QNX Aviage HMI Suite

The QNX Aviage HMI Suite is an Adobe-Flash based toolkit optimized for creating quality embedded HMIs. The suite includes a stand-alone player for running Adobe Flash Lite 3 applications, including audio, Flash video, and network communications. It provides increased performance through hardware acceleration of Flash rendering and an HMI library to efficiently create faster performing HMIs.

Business benefits

Fast time to market

The QNX Aviage HMI Suite allows developers to create executable specifications and leap directly from graphical prototype to final product without HMI re-coding. It allows them to test entire HMIs on their desktops and then run the exact same content on embedded targets without re-engineering. And because the QNX Flash player behaves properly in a realtime and memory-constrained environment, it gives developers the power of Adobe Flash without sacrificing system reliability.

Reduced development risk

Millions of developers know Flash development – from screen design to ActionScript programming. The QNX Aviage HMI Suite lets companies capitalize on this talent along with the thousands of Flash components and source examples available for use in production HMIs.

Quality, compelling products

Use the renowned Adobe CS3/CS4 environment to create some of the most compelling graphical interfaces available today; rely on the underpinnings of the QNX Neutrino RTOS for the robustness and reliability embedded products need.

New Features

• Enhanced performance — The QNX Aviage HMI Suite now supports Open VG hardware-accelerated rendering on select graphics controllers for the best performance and provides software library extensions to accelerate common Flash transitions such as offscreen rendering, bit blitting, and scroll list management.
• QNX Aviage HMI library — This powerful, easy-to-use collection of core ActionScript classes can load and define Flash modules on startup for creating more effective HMIs, giving development the shortcut it needs. The library also provides an efficient interface between the ActionScript Flash HMI and any underlying native code, allowing the HMI to support reliable realtime requirements.
• Graphics composition capabilities — An OpenKODE-compliant composition manager now provided with the QNX Neutrino RTOS allows developers to merge the output of multiple windows and processes on a single display, even with lower cost graphics controllers that don’t support layering.

Technology highlights

• Support for local and network-capable Flash content as well as video playback (FLV)
• Support for mixed-mode graphical environments – both Flash-based and native 2D and 3D graphics (such as OpenGL ES) and QNX Photon microGUI
• QNX-specific speed optimizations for Open VG hardware acceleration, off-screen rendering, scroll list management, and hardware supported Adobe transitions
• QNX Aviage HMI library for easily creating embedded standalone HMIs
• OpenKODE composition support with QNX SDP 6.4.1 and 6.4.0
• Optimization for low system overhead and optimal memory usage
• Extensible interface for easy calling from ActionScript into native code
• Adobe Acceptance Test Suite (ATS) certification
• Support for a wide range of embedded silicon, including ARM, PowerPC, SH-4, and x86

Seamlessly blend various graphics technologies

Application on the left is rendering a 3D OpenGL ES navigation display on the bottom graphics layer. FlashPlayer on the right is running a ‘Menu movie’ that is controlling the navigation display that appears inside the chroma color pane.

Specifications

Supported features

• Programming features support
  • Flash 9 or earlier content
  • ActionScript version 1.0, 2.0
  • Interruptible/re-entrant player
  • Dynamic loading of SWF data
  • XML sockets
  • XML parsing, string/array/XML-to-native-objects conversion
  • ActionScript strict mode
  • Set/clear interval
  • Shape-drawing API
  • Data storage
  • Video smoothing and deblocking
• Sound support
  • PCM and ADPCM
  • MP3 (supported when SWF content has embedded MP3 content, no support for MP3 live broadcasts)
• Image and video support
  • PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, SGI, TGA, animated GIF (during authoring)
  • Flash video (FLV) using On2 codec in addition to Sorenson codec
• Multimedia support
  • Dynamic loading of multimedia files using external codec support (e.g. JPEG)
• Text support
  • UTF-8 character set
  • Latin1, Latin2, Latin4, Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Big5 (Chinese), GBK (Chinese), ShiftJIS (Japanese), KoreanUHC
  • Dynamic text
  • Device-specific vector fonts
  • Improved small text readability, text measurement, text wrap
  • Inline text input, English only. Other languages supported through external input engines
• Interactivity
  • Keyboard events
  • Key-based navigation
  • Mouse/stylus events
• Flash Lite features
  • Access to device-specific features (such as volume, backlight) through private messaging services
  • Reduced runtime memory consumption
  • Graceful handling of out-of-memory conditions
  • Runaway script limit
  • ActionScript slicing
• Other features
  • X-ray debugging support
  • Caurina tweener library for optimized ActionScript tweening
  • Dynamic memory handling
  • Device-specific capabilities: Ability to query information about current environment. Extendable model: Contact QNX for details
  • Metadata support: Flash metadata
  • Background transparency
  • Object model (for components)
  • Improved event model
  • Scriptable masks
  • SWF file compression
  • Dynamic discovery of device features
  • ActionScript exception handling
  • Web services and SOAP API
  • New preloader API, progressive download
  • Enhanced local file security
  • Persistent storage

System requirements

• Typical FlashPlayer size (core player + renderer DLL): 800K code
• Recommended minimum RAM heap: 2MB for standalone content, more for video
• Suggested content size-to-heap ratio: 1 to 15. (e.g. recommended heap for 10K SWF file is 150K)
• Supported graphics chips with either color depth of ARGB8888, RGB565, ARGB1555 or hardware OpenVG (selected platforms)

Certification

• FlashPlayer binary is certifiable via ‘open’ certification or ‘closed’ certification:
• Open = FlashPlayer certified for any content, regardless of content origin
• Closed = FlashPlayer certified for known, trusted content only
• Unique Adobe certification waiver for closed systems
• Certification level must be Choosen and processes completed before start of production
  

When to use the QNX Aviage HMI HMI Suite

• Choose a Flash solution when system requirements involve:
  • High-end, powerful and popular graphic tools (Adobe™ Creative Suite®)
  • Complex screens with alpha-blends, transitions, morphing
  • Integrated audio with graphics, including videos (FLV)
  • Faster CPU: We recommend a maximum of 640x480 for embedded CPUs of 400MHz or less (when not using hardware accelerated Open VG)
• Choose a QNX Photon microGUI solution when system requirements involve:
  
  • Large screens with non-accelerated solutions
    
  • More traditional graphics (and possibly a windowing environment) using widget model and C/C++ callback routines
    
  • Screen builder tools using widget drag and drop
    
  • Remote graphical connections (e.g. Phindows)
    
• Choose a stand-alone QNX core graphics solution when system requirements involve:
  
  • 2D/3D (OpenGL ES) APIs without the need for screen builder tools
    
  • Third party graphical products built on the QNX Advanced Graphics TDK
    

QNX Software Systems supports Adobe® Flash Lite™ technology. For further information on developing content using Adobe Flash technology, see: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/device