Hi.
I know some of this has been discussed before, but i couldn’t find any closure on the matter, so sorry if i missed it.
Great new release on the app side (android). Was really looking forward to the joystick, and i think its working good. But i’m getting a bit frustrated about its size. I doesn’t fit anything. or anything else doesn’t fit the joystick. E.g. all widgets have a width of 1, 2, 4 or 8. Except the joystick which is 5. that makes it hard to use the space in a good way. Because the only widget that is 1 wide, is the LED. This brings me on to next point.
The discussion on size of interface/tabs and all the ideas that have been mentioned, what is the status of that? i think that e.g the widgets like: PUSH, EMAIL and so on don’t belong in a front-end of the project. Maybe it could be possible to move them to the backend? Or if you have decided to make it possible with tabs it could solve the problem. Anyway i think like they are now, a width of 2 for a non-interactive widget is a lot.
Last thing I know you base blynk on “actions” or what you called it. Like the BLYNK_WRITE.
I miss a promt function. A funtion where the device can promt an input from the user on. e.g. the terminal widget or the slider.
The use i need it for is I would like to send a message to the LCD or Terminal “Enter numer of frames” and then wait for a value to be entered on a virtual pin (terminal or slider)
I know i probably can do it some other way, but i tried and i think it gets messy with to many if() and extra variables.
If someone has a nice solution please tell.
Joystick’s size was optimized for better interaction on the regular smartphone screen. This is why it’s not smaller or bigger. It’s just the optimal size we’ve found.
We hear questions about giving more space by making other widgets smaller, but before doing that - we’ll check the data about the average amount of widgets per project.
Did you check Terminal example and LCD? You could write a message on LCD or Terminal and wait for users’ respond. You can also use global variables, put them into BLYNK_WRITE() and use them across your code. I think IF’s will be needed of course. If you could tell us how you would envision that - share your thoughts. It seems to be an interesting topic
We will get back to it when all the main widgets will be ready.
I too was thinking about this yesterday, with the devices deployed and still in progress, I have run out of screen space for buttons, would it be possible to have 2 versions, say a small button + the current size?
I would like a row of smaller buttons - even LED widget size would be good - for devices that dont get used frequently - Turning on an outside light etc, this will allow me to use standard buttons for common tasks.
Thanks for your response. @Pavel
And sorry for my late reply.
The answers make sense to me so i wont go any further into them except to clarify my thoughts about the “promt function”
The setup i need it for is a motorized camera control. At each startup i need 5 parameters entered by the user.
These parameters are often not the same so it makes sense to enter them each time.
I plan to have several users of this device, so user simplicity is key to me.
The way i want the user to experience it, is a message shows on the screen “Enter minutes…” and the value is entered, preferably through the Terminal.
The way i’ve got it to work (but heavy and not very flexible) i haven’t access to the code at the moment, so if you need i will post later.
But i created a menu as a switch-case with a variable to control where in the menu we are right now. then all cases contains the text and appropriate variable to be set by the Terminal.
Then the terminal has to cal the case variable, set param.asInt to a variable to be called in the case menu. This way it also makes it hard to use terminal for other things.
The way i would like it to work:
send a terminal.print()
someway tell blynk to wait for a value from Terminal, and a variable to assign it to.
When the user enters the variable, blynk does its magic and assign the value.
Somehow if possible, there would need to be a trigger or action added to the function to perform when the variable is set.
I don’t know if i’m making my thoughts clear (if not i will post code tomorrow) and if this is possible, or even nessesary. It might be a problem only I have or i’m over-complicating it, but i think this could be used in other situations to.
Thanks anyway and keep up the good work i know you must be busy
I hear you. It would be interesting to look at the code. Is it really that complicated. Anyway, al your thoughts and ideas on user input are interesting. We’ll definitely think about it. It might be a great use case
I know you base blynk on “actions” or what you called it. Like the BLYNK_WRITE.
i know you must be busy