Logitech LCD keyboard displays

[Agrajag]

Pete,

Logitech has been producing keyboards with LCD displays of late and the idea is starting to catch on. Now they have a few keyboards with the displays and an API for interfacing with it.

Until recently the apps available for it were pretty limited. Now they're starting to show up and some are quite helpful. For example, one of them adds a plugin to Trillian (the IM program) that outputs the data to the display. Thus, if you IM me and I'm in FS flying, I can now see your message on my keyboard display without having to ALT-TAB out to the desktop just to see if it's worth dealing with. Furthermore I can actually respond to the messages right from there. There are 4 programmable buttons on the display and the plugin has one set up for Reply. Very slick and very useful.

That got me thinking about AdvDisp. It'd be nice if AdvDisp could output its textual data, among other things, to this display instead of to the screen itself. That way it's out of the way and yet very convenient.

Thoughts?

[Pete Dowson]

Logitech has been producing keyboards with LCD displays of late and the idea is starting to catch on. Now they have a few keyboards with the displays and an API for interfacing with it.

Not seen any of those. How many lines/characters per line?

That got me thinking about AdvDisp. It'd be nice if AdvDisp could output its textual data, among other things, to this display instead of to the screen itself. That way it's out of the way and yet very convenient.

I'm not really developing Advdisplay any more, having moved the main point of it into the latest FSUIPC versions. However, I can take a look for the latter. Any links to details? Keyboard names/ids etc?

Pete

[Agrajag]

Here's a link to one of the keyboards, the G15 from Logitech:

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/produNTID=10717

They now have others with it. I'm not seeing any specs on the LCD resolution but it holds a good amount of data for my uses now.

In IM message displays I get 4 full lines of text plus a line made up of a title bar with buttons assignments on them (there are buttons below the display and this text lets you know their current dynamic function.)

It supports variably sized fonts so number of lines is a bit up to the author and the font size they can live with.

[Pete Dowson]

They now have others with it. I'm not seeing any specs on the LCD resolution but it holds a good amount of data for my uses now.

Hmmmnot enough for Radar Contact though, the main user of the multi-line display facilities in FSUIPC.

It supports variably sized fonts so number of lines is a bit up to the author and the font size they can live with.

Yes, I see from the SDK that the application can retrieve the size of the display and then has to provide a bitmap for the display. The code it needs is relatively trivial, but the text font calculations and conversion to a bitmap, using Windows GDI facilities, is bulky and tedious. I've not got enough time to fit this in at present.

I've made a note of it and may consider adding support some time in the future. Meanwhile it may be worthwhile seeing if some other programmer may like to write a utility for it -- as Jose Oliveira did with the Showtext utility for displaying the messages in a window separate from FS (even on a WideFS client).

Regards,

Pete

[Agrajag]

Thanks Pete. Seemed like a goof fit for SB3 and that just made me think of AdvDisp so I figured I'd make you aware of it in case it sparked some great new idea with you.

And welcome back. Glad to see you posting again.