When you look at the above picture, you'll probably be surprised by several details. The first is not forcibly obvious, it's the flexible GUI design which means that it's made in a way that it displays on different Nextion HMI screen formats and sizes without any modification. To demonstrate this, I created this system information page which you may easily add as a feature or a so-called easter egg to your projects. The second thing is that while some of the displayed system information can easily be retrieved from the corresponding system variables, others like the model, the serial number, the CPU id, the firmware version and the memory size are a bit more tricky and require the use of a less well documented feature. But one after the other...

I recently got an email from R., a French speaking reader, saying: "Hello. I have a Nextion 7011R screen. Everything went well during the upload, but now the screen keeps flashing. It is impossible to upload again! How can I solve this problem? Thank you." - While this is definitively not enough information to give competent help, not to mention the fact that something like a "Nextion 7011R screen" does not exist, this is the occasion to have a deeper look into what happens inside the Nextion at boot and at runtime. So, we may better understand what can potentially go wrong, and how to prevent or fix it.

While continuing the development of the stylish Nextion HMI DIY EDGE clock, see articles here, here, and here, we discovered that it was time to look for some permanent storage, even in case of power failure, for the current custom settings and the (future) alarm time and status. While the Nextion's real time clock (RTC) can easily be maintained and kept running by clipsing a CR1220 battery into its socket on the back of our screen, it takes a little more effort to maintain parameters like the currently selected language, the enabled or disabled AM/PM and date indicators because these reside normally in RAM and will be gone after a power outage.

Two weeks ago, we started with the first, English only, version of the EDGE Clock, a word clock running standalone (without an external MCU) on a EDGE series NX4848E040. You may (re-) read the corresponding article by clicking here. Last week, I gave you a second release (click here) which allowed to display the current time either in English or in German, just by swiping the screen right or left, and which had already some code optimizations. Today, you may swipe further to select English, German, or French as the display language. And there are more code optimizations. Please read below.

Teaser: Now, you can swipe right and left to change between the English and the German version. In opposite to my initial idea to explain the code in all details, I decided to realize the additional languages first. French will be the next. While adding German, for example, I found still some potential to optimize the code or to make it better readable and understandable. There was also an ugly hurdle: While adding the Text components, I discovered that the font which I generated based on the ASCII charset would not work with German diacritics like the "Ü" in "FÜNF" or the "Ö" in "ZWÖLF". So, I had to generate the font again with Latin extensions...

Now, that the square 4" Edge series NX4848E040 has finally come to market, I think that I owe you a nice project to realize with and I decided for a so-called word clock. The principle of a word clock is a square (or almost square) letter matrix in which all the needed words to spell the time are more or less hidden. Only the words describing the current time are highlighted. This refined display makes these clocks popular design objects and, guess who has now one on his desk... 😉