Lighting UI implementation

[rbroders]

I'm doing a floorplan based UI, and for each light, I was planning to have a plan representation of the light.

If the light is off, I want an outline of the light with a black center.
If the light is on, I want an outline of the light with white dashes coming out and the center representing the dim level of the light (white for full on, gray for partially on).

The dashes indicate the light is on even if the dim state is very low. I have two fields for each light: Boolean for on/off, and 0-127 for level.

I'm trying to come up with an elegant/efficient implementation (or perhaps an alternate UI). So far I'm using a boolean image for the white dashes based on the boolean field, and a static image for the dim level whose opacity is controlled by an event which watches the dim_level field.

This works, but I'm worried that creating triggers and events for all of my lights (I have about 60 dimmer circuits) will be very hard on the system. Also each circuit has several lights, so there could be quite a number of these widgets...

I looked at progress bars, but they don't quite do what I want. Also instead of the opacity controlled static image I could use a color controlled area color fill, but the color fill would need an overlay image so it produced the right shape.

Thanks for any ideas you might have -- Bob

[Dean Roddey]

Yeh, I wouldn't impose that sort of load on the system just to support that UI style. One way would be to use a logo widget. You'd have to create a sequence of dimmer level images of increasing color, and the logo image widget would use the current value of the dimmer to select the right image. The images would be small so there wouldn't be a big problem with having 127 of them.

It would be a bit annoying to create the images, but once done the rest is easy.

I really should do a scalable color fill drivable by range based fields. And, for that matter, a 'field transparency image' widget that's an image whose opacity is driven by the value of a range based field. Those would both be quite useful.