about font and bitmap pixel

Question

My project uses the IAR compiler. The contents of the link file are as follows:

    define region TEXT_region = mem: [from 0x80000000 to 0x803FFFFF];
    define region FONT_AND_BITMAP_PIXEL_region = mem: [from 0x80400000 to0x80FFFFFF];

In my project, The size of code is 1.6M and the size of font and bitmap pixel is 5M, so the size of the entire image file (target.bin) is 9M;
My trouble is that I have to download a 9M image file every time I debug, and this process takes me a lot of time. I want to separate the font and bitmap pixels from the image file so that I don’t have to download them repeatedly. How should I achieve this?

Answer 1

Hello,

if there are no changes within your resouces (you can put bitmap and font resources into separate units), then there is no need to flash the address range again. But I'm not sure if you can exclude a certain address range from download within IAR workbench.

Anyhow, this can be a dangerous approach - please consider that also the resources of your project may change and thus the entire binary will change!

In order to reduce the flashing timg in case you are using fonts with thousands of characters, you can try to reduce the Ranges of your fonts to a minimum - just for development and add the whole character set once the project is more or less final.

Furthermore, you should try to develop the GUI appplication within Embedded Wizard Studio by using the Prototyper so that downloading to the target is only necessary from time to time...

Best regards,

Manfred.