Serving up hot UIs at the Smart Kitchen Summit

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The annual Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) is a must-attend event for those interested in the innovations within the food technology, cooking, and kitchen space. We were fortunate to attend the inaugural European event in Dublin this past June, and are pleased to sponsor and attend the North American event in Seattle, WA, October 8-9, 2018.

With the rapid adoption of modern appliances and cutting-edge technology in the kitchen, we’ve been bringing our graphical HMI and touch-screen GUI technology to innovative professional and consumer white goods products worldwide. We will be showcasing demos of smart kitchen GUIs at the event, as well as demonstrating how easy it is to create well-designed and high-performance graphical interfaces for appliances using Storyboard Suite.

Check out this Storyboard multimodal smart oven demo that incorporates voice as an input. Snips voice technology runs completely on-device which keeps data private and allows for offline functionality.

If you are planning to attend the Smart Kitchen Summit and haven’t bought your tickets yet, you can use the code CRANK25 to save 25% on the ticket price.

As always, we provide a full-featured 30-day evaluation for you to try out Storyboard Suite first hand.

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Developing beautiful UIs for the new NXP i.MX RT1060

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Storyboard Suite for the NXP i.MX RT1060

*** This post was written in collaboration with Garry, our delightful UK Field Application Engineer. Garry visited the new Crank headquarters this week and, being a team player, he grabbed a baseball glove and helped the Crank softball team (nearly) win a game in the local high-tech league! ***

This week at the NXP Connects event in Shenzhen, China, NXP announced the new i.MX RT1060 Crossover Processor with an Arm® Cortex®-M7 core.

Working closely with the NXP i.MX team, we helped create a new application demo to support the product launch. Our white goods demo features a washing machine front panel GUI to demonstrate Storyboard Suite’s animation capabilities for embedded devices, which helps bring life to modern GUIs.

The i.MX RT1060 has increased memory resources which enable higher resolution and larger form-factor LCD panels to be deployed such as with the new 5 inch 800×480 LCD fitted to the EVK used in our demo.

We developed this demo using the Storyboard FreeRTOS Cortex M7 runtime engine, which is supported with the latest Storyboard 5.3 and RTOS SDK. The combination of this lightweight real-time OS and our optimized graphics runtime engine allows us to achieve the fast cold-boot times you can see in the video

We are running application code directly from on-board QSPI flash using an eXecute In Place (XIP) configuration along with graphical resources and images streamed directly from flash for minimized CPU loading. For this launch demo, we worked with the early beta board support package (BSP) tools and drivers from NXP.

We are currently working on a Storyboard Suite demo image for you to download for the RT1060. Subscribe to the Crank blog to be notified when it’s available.

In the meantime, try Storyboard Suite for yourself. Start your free, 30-day trial now and see how easy it is to create beautiful embedded GUIs from concept to production.

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Developing rich GUI experiences for Boundary Devices Nitrogen platforms

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Boundary Devices

Boundary Devices has an array of Single Board Computers (SBC) that leverage NXP i.MX applications processors for developing rich, high-performance embedded products.

Storyboard Suite GUI demo images for Boundary Devices Nitrogen Single Board Computers

We are continually working with popular platforms to test and showcase the scalability of Storyboard Suite for GUI design and development. We recently added a demo image for the Nitrogen6_MAX, which features the i.MX 6 Quad family of applications processors. This demo includes applications that span the automotive, home automation, and consumer embedded markets.

Designed and developed in Storyboard Suite, these application GUIs are built with a modern design aesthetic with a focus on usability, scalability, and performance. As always, our demo images are easy to download and install to your target advice. Download it and try it out!

Storyboard Suite GUI on the Nitrogen8M

Check out the following video from our friends at Boundary Devices of a Storyboard Suite demo running on their powerful and impressive Nitrogen8M platform.


Try Storyboard Suite for yourself, start your free, 30-day trial now and see how easy it is to create beautiful embedded GUIs from concept to production.

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Developing brilliant embedded UIs for the i.MX RT1050

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Storyboard on the NXP i.MX RT

Late last year, NXP announced the i.MX RT Series, a crossover processor that is optimized for low power and high performance. Built for efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and lower power usage, the i.MX RT Series doesn’t compromise on what’s important to end users; high-performance, usability, advanced multimedia, and impressive graphics. This series fills a gap and hits a sweet spot that offers the best of both the MCU and application processor worlds to provide an excellent platform option for medical, IoT, building/home automation, and smart appliance applications.

Helpful resources to get you started with embedded GUI development for the RT1050

Check out the following resources to understand more about building applications for NXP RT1050 platforms.

Demo images: We’ve been building up our inventory of NXP demo images to make it fast and simple for you to see applications on your i.MX RT1050 platforms with both uClinux and FreeRTOS variants. Download them and try them out!

On-demand webinar: In addition to demo images, we also have an on-demand i.MX1050 webinar, “Delivering performance, functionality, and stunning design to embedded products” available that we hosted with NXP.

EmCraft demo: Our friends at EmCraft Systems created a short demo built with Storyboard Suite and instructions for quickly installing it to an NXP i.MX RT1050 EVK board.

Haven’t tried Storyboard Suite yet? Download our full-featured 30-day FREE trial today, and test drive it for your embedded UI development.

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Crank Software is moving!

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It was inevitable. Eventually, just about every successful company has to take the leap and uproot and move its office. For a growing company like ours, moving to a bigger office space is almost a rite of passage and is a commitment to our employees, partners, and customers that Crank’s story is evolving and our future is bright. Our new office has space for us to double in size, and we plan to make full use of that.

But moving can be daunting. With so many logistics to manage and the potential for things to go wrong, we’ve put countless hours into planning and anticipating to minimize any disruption to our customers and our business.

Tomorrow is the big day! We have bins stacked high full of beloved desk essentials, all anxiously awaiting their new, bright, beautiful home.

via GIPHY

So, why did we have to move?

Simply put, we’ve run out of room! This is a good thing. We’ve been growing to better serve our customers and to continue to evolve Storyboard Suite to make it the best possible GUI development framework for embedded UI designers and developers. Not just good, but the best.

We’ve been joking over the past couple of months that any additional Crankonauts (Crank Software employees) would have to work in the washroom, server room, or coat closet. The idea of double-decker office spaces was floated and, rightfully so, shot down. We’ve completely outgrown our boardroom and lunchroom. We’ve been having meetings wherever we can find space. It’s been getting harder to find places to put our bikes. Time to move!

Also, the new office is closer to the mountain bike trails.

How does the move affect our customers and partners?

We are working hard to minimize any potential disruption. The move will happen tomorrow and it will be business as usual on Monday. We will still be responding to calls and emails promptly during the move. Our phone number and email address remain unchanged:

Phone: +1-613-595-1999
Fax: +1-613-701-0204
Email: info@cranksoftware.com

Our shipping address change is effective immediately, so please update your records with our new contact information:

Crank Software Inc.
1000 Innovation Dr, Suite 100
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K2K 3E7

As always, you can download our full-featured 30-day FREE trial of Storyboard Suite and test drive it for your embedded UI development.

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