Creating PlugIns For current SW

T

trand123

New member
Hi,

I have embedded SW developed for a system, and I would like to use CC panel to dispay the status of the HW and the SW processes. The SW is developed in MS Visual Studio 2005.

I have the CC2 Service.exe installed and running. I can display the CPU usage report etc. Now to the Plug-In SDK code that comes with the download: It has very little documentation, so I need little/more guidance. I have the Plug-In SDK code and I hope to create the DLL. I want to pass e.g Software Version Number for display on the CC panel. What do I need to do?

What I am trying to get advice on is, the:

- Connection between the CC2 Service.exe running on the PC as a service and the "Plug-In DLL" above that I created.

- How to use the DLL in my project/program to send the SW version number? What function are available for me to send the version data to the panel? How do I get the data sent by the panel, what function do I use?

When I look at the textfile.c I see the following functions:

BOOL get_line_from_start(FILE *fh, int line_num, char *line);
BOOL update(void);
void load_settings(void);
BYTE get_data(data_data *data);

In the absence of the header I am not clear if these are the functions that get used to send/receive the panel data.

Am I looking at the right software for the task I want to perform, or do I have write SW driver that does everything, open the port and then send data to it, keep track of the displayed colums, get data from the CC panel and send appropriate responses. If this is not the right SW, could you direct me to a DLL/SW that I could use to in my project to send panel data?

Thank you in advance for your response.
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C

CF Mark

Administrator
If you just want to display some simple info to the LCD and not use CC2's other plugins, you would be better off just writing to the LCD directly in your own software.
You would proabably get it working quicker and it would be a lot more light-weight.

If you still want to persist with using CC2, i would sugest that you have your app write the info out to a plain text file and then use CC2 + textfile2 plugin to read the data from your file and display it to the LCD.
 
T

trand123

New member
Creating Plugins for current SW

Thank you so much for ypur response.

I didn't understand some of the items:

> If you just want to display some simple info to the LCD and not use CC2's other plugins.

What other plugins are available? Perhaps you can direct me to the site where I could find the SW and other documentation.

I downloaded the files under "cc2-plugin-sdk", (as a matter of fact they are part of the CC2 Service.exe installation), and evetually got it compiled under MS VS2005 and created the "cc2_textfile.dll" (CC2_ I think is the MS VS addition) , but:

1. When I try to add as a reference to my existing project, the VS just hangs up. I suspect that there are some compatibility issues there.

2. Looking through the textfile.c there doesn't seem to be many functions (I gave the function list in my original post).

You mentioned "textfile2", do I have the right code for the Plugins?

Thanks again.
 
C

CF Mark

Administrator
trand123 said:
What other plugins are available? Perhaps you can direct me to the site where I could find the SW and other documentation.
Click to expand...
There are quite a lot.
Here is an older list:
http://www.crystalfontz.com/crystalcontrol2/manual/plugin-info.html

Quite a few have been added since then.
Look at the cc2_xxx.dll files in the CC2 directory.

I downloaded the files under "cc2-plugin-sdk", (as a matter of fact they are part of the CC2 Service.exe installation), and evetually got it compiled under MS VS2005 and created the "cc2_textfile.dll" (CC2_ I think is the MS VS addition) , but:

1. When I try to add as a reference to my existing project, the VS just hangs up. I suspect that there are some compatibility issues there.
Click to expand...
Odd.
Well, i dont know how i can help with that... could be a MSVS problem, or the could be something strange in the project settings.

2. Looking through the textfile.c there doesn't seem to be many functions (I gave the function list in my original post).
Click to expand...
Few functions = good :)

The functions with "DLLEXPORT" are the important ones.
They are the functions that the CC2 service calls to get data.


You mentioned "textfile2", do I have the right code for the Plugins?
Click to expand...
textfile2 is a newer version that uses regex to match text in files or off the net.
Ive only ever release the code for the textfile plugin, so textfile2 wont help you.
 
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