In my previous post I described how you can access framebuffer of Pebble screen via familiar X,Y coordinates. To reiterate: you capture framebuffer as a bitmap, and access bitmap as 2-dimentional matrix:

#define WINDOW_WIDTH 144
GBitmap *fb = graphics_capture_frame_buffer(ctx);
uint8_t (*fb_matrix)[WINDOW_WIDTH] = (uint8_t (*)[WINDOW_WIDTH]) gbitmap_get_data(fb);

After that you can access specific pixel on the screen via coordinates, e.g. fb_matrix[120][60] will represent pixel and coordinates Y = 120, X = 60

This works fine on Pebble Time (Basalt platform) where every pixel represented by a byte. But what about classic Pebble (I think this term is becoming quite popular, but to avoid confusion I will call it Aplite platform). On Aplite every byte in the framebuffer represent 8 pixels and the above approach doesn’t work.

Fortunately there’s a universal solution.
Continue reading →

Pebble smartwatch SDK offers a very extensive graphics library. And if that is not enough – you can access graphics memory directly for pixel-precision manipulation. For example this code

GBitmap *fb = graphics_capture_frame_buffer_format(ctx, GBitmapFormat8Bit);
uint8_t *fb_data = gbitmap_get_data(fb);

captures Pebble screen as a bitmap and consequently as raw uint8_t data you can manipulate. But the problem with this approach – you access the data as 1-dimensional array, which is very inconvinient when you’re dealing with 2-dimensional screen.

Fortunately due to magic of casting this problem can be addressed. Consider following addition to previous code:

#define WINDOW_WIDTH 144  
uint8_t (*fb_matrix)[WINDOW_WIDTH] = (uint8_t (*)[WINDOW_WIDTH]) fb_data;

Using this, you can access screen data via familiar coordinates. For example if you need to set pixel at coordinates Y=120, X=60 to black color, all you have to do is

fb_matrix[120][60] = 0;

And now we can rewrite InverterLayer from previous post to a simpler form. First in layer callback we create bitmap matrix and call effect function:

static void effect_layer_update_proc(Layer *me, GContext* ctx) {
  // getting layer coordinates
  GRect layer_frame = layer_get_frame(me);  
  
  //capturing framebuffer bitmap into 2-d matix
  GBitmap *fb = graphics_capture_frame_buffer_format(ctx, GBitmapFormat8Bit);
  uint8_t (*fb_matrix)[WINDOW_WIDTH] = (uint8_t (*)[WINDOW_WIDTH]) gbitmap_get_data(fb);
  
  //callig effect function
  effect_invert(fb_matrix, layer_frame);

  //releasing framebuffer
  graphics_release_frame_buffer(ctx, fb);
  
}

And actual inverting function becomes much simpler as well, simple loop thru layer pixel, inverting colors:

// position: x,y,h,w of the layer  
void effect_invert(uint8_t (*fb_a)[WINDOW_WIDTH], GRect position) {
  
  for (int y = 0; y < position.size.h; y++)
     for (int x = 0; x < position.size.w; x++)
        fb_a[y + position.origin.y][x + position.origin.x] = ~fb_a[y + position.origin.y][x + position.origin.x];
  
}

You can see this approach in EffectLayer library.

InverterLayer is a pretty cool feature of Pebble smartwath SDK, its simple purpose to invert colors of everything it’s placed over (black becomes white and vice versa).

Unfortunately it no longer works in SDK 3 (Basalt, Pebble Time) and will be depreciated. Fortunately it’s pretty straightforward to create your own InverterLayer. Continue reading →