[* Cross-posting From Reddit *]
Hi all,
Okay, here's my latest offering - An Animated Bitmap Viewer for your Pebble Watch!
As part of my Journey of Discovery into the wonderful world of Pebble Programming, I've recently been experimenting with animating bitmap images. Obviously, the resources to do this on a Pebble are pretty limited (in particular, there is a fixed resource segment limit of about 64k) but it turns out you can still do some cool stuff with even a limited amount of space.
In my previous offering (the Tempus Fugit Muti-Function Timing App) I used animation for an opening splash page and to animate a small logo to illustrate when the program is running. In this latest offering I get a bit more ambitious.
This is an initial proof-of-concept release of a basic bitmap image viewer that allows you to view multiple series of images, either single stepping through them, or viewing them as an animated sequence at any frame rate from 2 frames to 20 frames per second. You can toggle between stepping and animation from the program menu, then reverse direction and/or switch between the two animation sequences while the animation is running. I even included a basic captioning capability for one series, just to show how easily it can be done!
There's still no way to load or change the bitmaps on the fly, but in honor of the occasion I've preloaded two different sets of 11 images each (both taken from Edward Muybridge's pioneering work creating the world's first animated images).
To demonstrate the Pebble's ability to multitask (and to reduce the number of program slots required by the SteamCab offerings) this App also includes a copy of both the Lefthanded and Righthanded versions of the SteamCab Analog Watchface (yup, I do plan to have this watchface take over the world, why do you ask? :-)
As is customary with these SteamCab offerings, the source code to this App is published simultaneously at Github.com. It has been extensively annotated to encourage learning and experimentation. Fully annotated source code is available here ->
Instructions are given in the program source code on how to swap out the prebuilt images and recompile the program - it's really quite easy if you use CloudPebble.net to do the heavy lifting. Check out the file "Nickleodeon.c" for details.
The maximum size of images that can be included is currently limited to 64k (this is the upper limit of a program resource segment in the current version of the Pebble SDK). The two supplied series are each about half screen in size for a total of 22 images. You could easily fit in a lot more images in if you reduced their average size. I would also suspect you could do some cute animated shorts with captioning, if you put your mind to it. This would seem to be an area which should be ripe for experimentation.
Hope this is of interest to some of you. Please feel free to experiment with the source code, and as usual, feedback is most welcome!