I’m updating a smart meter with an EVE Colour Touch Display. Will I need to upgrade the MCU to process all of the graphics?

No, EVE does most of the hard work to render your colour graphics and so a powerful MCU is not needed. This also allows your MCU to do other tasks such as processing the meter data or talking to remote metering equipment over a wireless link.

Some features of EVE which help minimise the MCU’s workload include:

• EVE’s efficient command-based screen creation allows complex graphics with minimal MCU workload and SPI traffic
• Using built-in widgets such as gauges, gradients and buttons further reduces this, allowing user controls to be created easily without complex graphical operations or calculations
• Your MCU only needs to send a new display list when the screen content changes (no need to refresh the screen constantly)
• Store sections of the display list in EVE’s RAM for parts of the screen content that do not often change and recall them using the APPEND command
• On BT817/818/817A, you can now also store sections of co-processor lists and recall with the CALLLIST command for even greater flexibility

Use EVE’s interrupts to tell your MCU when a touch event has occurred, and use touch tags to easily determine which item was touched