Data entry
I have been on a restricted diete since December, which means I’m forbidden from drinking coffee. So I feel slow. And now we have the Covid-19 virus situation... Despite everything, I’ve made a step forward with the development of the unit and now I come up with another demonstration. This time it is dedicated to table operations.
In the unit, it was necessary to program the table reception and its saving. Also the table’s renaming. It sounds simple but it is a piece of code. It was also necessary to design it properly. I wrote most of this part in the train when I went to Prague and back in January. Then I just fine-tuned it and fix eventual errors.
What was more complex is the design of data entry on the user’s side. I tried to focus on creation of simple time and PWM values entering without unnecessary clicks. Therefore, I formatted the insertion of the time so that only numbers are entered without the necessity of inserting separator characters. To enter the PWM values, just the numbers and the decimal point are required; so at the end the numeric keypad is sufficient to do this job. The movement between the fields is by means of the Tab or cursor keys. The Enter key jumps to the next and the Escape key reverts to the original value.
Concerning the name of the table, which is basically a file name in the unit’s file storage, it can be 50 bytes long. I have used the word bytes (not characters) because some characters may occupy more than one byte. So, the name is not limited to numbers and non-diacritical Latin alphabet. Diacritics and other characters can also be used. There are a few prohibited characters which is subject to the same rules as in Windows. Any whitespaces at the end of the name are automatically stripped.
The following video shows entering a short table and saving it to the unit. It is also possible to see the table name is renamed to a name with the Czech diacritics, and finally to a name in Chinese. The unit is then turned off and when turned on, connected to another device (phone) where one can see that the table has really been saved. One row of the table is deleted and one, modified. The table is saved again. Then the unit is connected to the computer.
