Embedded Wizard Studio: Generate CLUT dialog

With this dialog you can automatically generate an application specific CLUT (color look-up table) to use in target systems running its graphics hardware with Index8 color format. This dialog appears when activating the command Generate CLUT file ... and permits you to choose the options to control the generation:

Generate CLUT dialog

The automatic CLUT generation is based on statistical information about how often and which colors do appear on the screen when the GUI application is running. Before the CLUT can be generated you have to collect this information by using the command Start Prototyper with color statistic ....

Strategy for the generation algorithm

Embedded Wizard supports the following three strategies to generate CLUT from the collected color statistic information:

Strategy

Description

Majority

Takes care on colors with a high occurrence, whereas colors with low occurrence are merged together. In other words, frequently used colors are preferred even if these colors have similar nuance.

Diversity

Takes care that as much as possible different color nuances are kept within the CLUT, independent from their real occurrence.

Popularity

This strategy can be seen as a compromise between Majority and Diversity. Primarily it takes care on different colors only (similar to Diversity) by promoting colors with high occurrence (similar to Majority). Rarely used colors are merged together, even if these are very different.

To select the appropriate strategy click on the combo box as shown in the following screenshot:

Name of the destination CLUT file

Embedded Wizard stores the generated CLUT per default in the file Clut.txt within the directory of the current project. You can however specify another name or location for the generated CLUT file.

To specify another CLUT file name enter it in the edit field as shown in the following screenshot:

Please note, that if the entered file path is not absolute, it will be evaluated relative to the project directory.

Number of reserved CLUT entries

Reserved CLUT entries are intended for external GUI components, which access and modify the CLUT directly while coexisting with the GUI application developed by Embedded Wizard. The maximum number of entries you can reserve within the CLUT is limited to 127.

Lets assume, in your project you want to combine the Embedded Wizard created GUI with an external component for a navigation system, which in turn requires 16 colors of the CLUT for private usage. In such case you have to protect 16 CLUT entries from being allocated by Embedded Wizard GUI.

To specify the number of reserved CLUT entries click on the small triangle icons found on the right hand side of the spinner control:

or

Click on the spinner to focus it.

Enter the desired number value in range 0 .. 127.

Additional user defined colors

With user defined colors you can specify colors to explicitly include within the final CLUT, independent from their occurrence within the color statistic. This is intended for external GUI components depending on predefined, fixed colors.

Unlike the reserved CLUT entries, user defined colors can be used by the Embedded GUI application if appropriate. However, the corresponding CLUT entries are considered as fixed, so it is not allowed to change them at the runtime. All user defined colors are shown in the list box:

The notation of color values shown in the list box corresponds to the literal syntax of the color data type.

Add new user defined color

To add a new user defined color click on the button Add user defined color ....

Thereupon the Color select dialog appears where you can exactly specify the color.

Remove user defined color

To remove an existing user defined color, select it first within the list box.

Then click on the button Remove selected color.

Edit user defined color

To edit an existing user defined color, select it first within the list box.

Then click on the button Edit selected color.

Thereupon the Color select dialog appears where you can modify the color.

Generate

The CLUT generation is started by pressing the button Generate. This process may take between few seconds and several minutes. The number of colors, which are reduced by the CLUT generator are reported within the Log window.

In order to use the generated CLUT within your Index8 based platform, the CLUT file has to be selected in the attribute Clut of a profile member.