Bar Widget

The bar widget is used to display all kinds of bars.

LCD4Linux tries to do a quite good job with bar handling. It supports vertical, horizontal and split bars (two independent bars in one line), all bar types can be used simultanously.

At the moment one style is implemented for east and west bars: hollow. It's a frame around the bar, looks very cool ;) (See CoolStuff for a sample)

Handling bars is really a tricky job: Most displays only have a limited number of user-defined characters (normally 8 of'em), which is far too less for an exact display of all these bars. If you use icons too, the number of available characters is reduced again. So LCD4Linux does some sort of error diffusion by replacing characters with similar ones. Here you have to take another point into account: If you redefine a character which is currently displayed, you will get a lot of ugly flicker on the display. So any currently displayed char will not be redefined, even if it's not used after the next update. Only if the error diffusion fails, such chars will be redefined in a second pass. The result looks quite good!

If you don't believe me that this stuff is weird, take a look at the bar handling code in drv_generic_text.c. You win a six-pack if you understand this code

A bar widget looks like this:

Widget <name> {
    class       'Bar'
    expression  <expr>
    expression2 <expr>
    length      <number>
    min         <number>
    max         <number>
    direction   <char>
    style       <char>
    foreground  <color>
    background  <color>
    update      <number>
    barcolor0   <color>
    barcolor1   <color>
}

Widget BusyBar {
    class      'Bar'
    expression  proc_stat::cpu('busy',   500)
    expression2 proc_stat::cpu('system', 500)
    length      10	
    direction  'E'
    style      'H'
    update      100
    BarColor0  'ff0000'
    BarColor1  '00ff00'

If you omit expression2, you will get a single bar, controlled by expression only. If you specify an expression2 (and your display supports split bars), you will get a split bar, the upper half controlled by expression, and the lower half by expression2.

Widget MP3Bar {
    class 'Bar'
    expression  xmms('uSecPosition')
    length 20
    min 0
    max xmms('uSecTime')
    direction 'E'
    update tick
}

This Widget can be used with the XMMS-Plugin. It displays a progress bar. length sets the length of the progress bar (No. of chars).

Normally, bars do autoscale, which means they start at a value of 0 (zero), and remember their maximum value, and scale automagically to this maximum.

Sometimes this behaviour is not what you want (e.g. with temperatures). In this case, just specify the minimum and maximum value with the min and max parameters.

LCD4Linux-0.9 did support logarithmic bars. Of course, LCD4Linux-0.10 does so, too, but there's nothing special to deal with: just specify (any) mathematical function in the expression….