Lots of development on the 5″ Nextion screens

Mark AJ6CU  has announced that he have completed what he considers a “beta 1″ for the 5″ version of the CEC user interface.

Note this user interface is substantially different than the original one released by KD8CEC (see screenshots below).  It has been optimized for 800×480 screens and is probably not easily migrated to smaller ones (sorry),

But if you are a lucky ham with either a 7″ or 9” Nextion, it should be a simple matter of opening the “.hmi” file up in the Nextion editor, change the Device settings to match your screen, and compile it to create a tft file.  Mark acknowledges the original work done by Joe Puma (KD2NFC).  Without his headstart, Mark says “I would probably have not been able to complete this.”

The files (both .tft and .hmi are in the files section for the IO BITX20 group.: Files/AJ6CU Nextion 5-inch files/Nextion5inch June 23, 2019-Beta1/

The following screenshots show some of the new GUI.

MAIN MENU
The main change here was to Group the various functions in to “Applications”, “Settings” and “Expert”. Mark did some renaming so that it was clearer on the functions. Also, Factory Recovery now has its own screen that clarifies what is happening (for dummies …). And there is an “About” screen…

ABOUT SCREEN
Every applications should have its own About screen. 🙂

Note that in addition to credits and version, there is a list of the three known problems.

Save/Recall from Memory
Mark has added a popup virtual keyboard for adding a label/tag to a memory location. And he has also made sure that the Current VFO setting was kept. That allows you to turn around on your VFO while the Store to Memory is onscreen and you can save it whenever you find something interesting.

BANDSCAN
The Bandscan as originally designed had a number of problems including only able to look at signals 2k at a time and a maximum bandwidth of ~250kHz. This meant that if you scanned 80m, you only got the bottom half of the band. Mark didn’t like the way bands were pre-selected, as he preferred that the user could select any three in any order. He has added several missing bands.  (For folks outside of USA FCC, it is easy to change these bands from within the .HMI file. Let me know if you would like to do this and I will provide details.) . There is still some room for improvements here.  Mark plans to experiment with a smaller frequency step and smaller scan bandwidth. But that would be part of a future effort…

The first photo below shows the popup selection of offsets from the beginning of the band, using a mechanism similar to how the mode CWL/USB, etc is selected on the front page. The second photo shows a completed band scan that gets to the top of the 3 selected bands.

CW Decoder
Mark has made some minor GUI changes and renamed this function to reflect its functionality. He has also added a slider switch on the left to select between Signal analysis and CW decode.

Factory Recovery
Previously, pushing Factory Recovery required  3 presses to run Factory Recovery. But there was no explanation of what it did and why you probably did not want to do it!  Mark has added a separate screen with explanation and double confirmation.

Main Menu
Mark has added direct access to Store/Record to Memory (see upper right). Also he somewhat liked this spectrum that he captured on Field Day. 🙂

Mark’s Setup
Mark has run both a 5″ and a 3.2″ display simultaneously (thanks Ian!) during development. This allowed for quick answers to the inevitable questions such as: “What did Ian originally attend this screen to do?”  It was very helpful and he would recommend this approach to anybody else that is doing development for Nextion screens.

Reference