Developing beautiful embedded UI graphics 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 800x480 LCD fitted to the EVK used in our demo.

Crank Storyboard Embedded Graphics UI Demo for NXP i.MX RT1060 (video)

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