PixelUI

DEVELOPMENT PAUSED

This project is temporarily paused due to my preparation for the postgraduate entrance examination(until Dec. 2026). If you find this project interesting, please notice that:

• No new features will be added during this period.
• Issues and PRs may not be responded to in time.

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This is a lightweight C++ animated UI & app framework for resource-constrained embedded devices (e.g. ESP32).
PixelUI provides a modular, event-driven, and component-based UI system with smooth rendering and animations powered by U8G2.
Its design focuses on performance, low memory footprint, and easy extensibility, enabling developers to build complex UIs with minimal effort.

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🏗 Architecture

Core

• PixelUI: Entry point and central dispatcher, including input routing and animations, etc.
• Renderer: Draws the current UI to display buffer.
• AnimationManager manages animations with shared pointers. using Fixed-point arithmetic ensures predictable performance on MCUs without FPU. Supports protected animations, survive bulk cleanup operations.
• Coroutine A light-weight coroutine implementation, useful when writing animation load sequence.
• ViewManager: Stack-based view management.

Components

• Widget versatile widget system, supports custom widgets with animations and interactions.
• ListView: Scrollable menu supporting:
  • Submenus
  • Executable items
  • Configurable boolean/integer options
• IconView: Scrollable menu, displays item icon for selection.
• AppLauncher: Implementation of IconView, coupled with AppSystem to acquire all registered apps.
• Popup: PopupManagers, Popup base and interface, Popup derivations
• Focus: Focus system for widget choosing.
• Blinker: To achieve Non-blocking blink.

Resource Strategy

• Minimized dynamic memory allocation to avoid fragmentation.
• Logic (Heartbeat) and rendering (renderer) fully separated.

📦 Getting Started

#Third-Party Dependencies (Git Submodules)

• This project uses the following Git submodules, placed under third_party/:
  • ETL (Embedded Template Library)
  • U8G2

Initialize/update submodules after clone to download them under third_party/ :

git submodule update --init --recursive

Build simulator

• To build the PC Qt6 simulator, ensure the following option exists in the root CMakeLists.txt (default ON):

option(BUILD_SIMULATOR "Build PC Qt simulator" ON)

• You can also set it via CMake command line:

cmake -B build -S . -DBUILD_SIMULATOR=ON
cmake --build build

Check out wiki page to see how to adapt PixelUI to your system!

📜 License

At the BETA stage, PixelUI is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). This means you are free to use, modify, and redistribute PixelUI, but any derivative work must also be licensed under GPLv3.

For future stable releases, PixelUI is planned to be distributed under the BSD 2-Clause License (BSD v2).

👉 See the LICENSE file for the full license text, or visit:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html