Homegate crashes Ctouch

[Dave Byron]

Darren
Send a Ctouch project to Tech Support that crashes with an error message something like this;

"Homegate fatal error - not enough parms in drop down box"

and that the end of the ctouch unit

dave

[Darren]

I haven't heard of this one. There isn't enough information for me to guess what the cause may even be. Once it gets to Tech Support (and I get back from holidays), I will have a look.

[Dave Byron]

Darren
Sent to TS on 21/12/06 though you would never know as they do not acknowledge the emails or give a reference number.

To save you time its caused by the slide show, comment it out and all works well, my money would be on a memory management problem.

Have a good New Year

dave

[Richo]

What size are the photos for the slide show? Have you tried scaling them to the screen size of the CTC (640x480) so that they are small.

[Dave Byron]

Richo
All pictures set to max size 640 * 480 to save cpu steam rescaling every time they got displayed, try the files sent to TS.

dave

[Dave Byron]

It seems the cause of the problem is not enough free RAM cause by having the slides as jpeg files (full screen size times 100 screens), and it would appear that Homegate does not check the free space before loading the images – hence overwrites itself and crashes.

From Tech Support.
HomeGate has an "Image Manager" which controls the loading and storing of all images used by HomeGate. When a project is opened, the Image Manager loads all images needed by the project. If an image is used more than once, the Image Manager makes sure only one copy is loaded to save memory. If you are using bitmaps, then the full allocation of memory required will be already used at this time. If you use JPEGs, however, the situation is a bit different. The JPEG gets loaded straight away. The first time the JPEG gets drawn, it is "expanded" to a bitmap and then drawn (you can't draw a JPEG directly). This expanded bitmap then gets stored for the next time the image needs to be drawn.

Consider the following example. A project uses 5 JPEG images, each 100KB, each full screen (these will be 1MB when expanded). These are on Pages 1 to 5. The start-up page has no images.

The project is loaded, including the JPEG images. Total memory usage (for images) is 500KB. The user selects Page 1 which displays JPEG 1. JPEG 1 gets expanded to a bitmap and drawn. Graphics usage is now 1500KB. The user goes back to the start-up page. No change in memory usage. The user selects Page 2 which displays JPEG 2. JPEG 2 gets expanded to a bitmap and drawn. Graphics usage is now 2500KB. The user goes back to the start-up page. No change in memory usage. The user selects Page 1. JPEG 1 has already been expanded, so graphics usage stays the same and so on....

The answer it would seem is to use bmp files when large/lots of graphic files are needed.

dave

[desd]

Dave


Did using bmp's rather than jpg's solve this problem?

I have a similar (but not the same error message) problem having 91 jpg's (all 640x480 and about 100kb ea). The screen freezes, but doesn't always completely crash. 25% of the timescreen starts funtioning normaly after you acknowledge the error but the rest of the time it needs a complete reset.

This is not a slide show, but 91 individual pages.

The error message I get is:

“Exception “E out of resources” in module Homegate.exe at 000306A5.

Invalid message for a combo box because it does not have an edit control.

Module: Graphics, source; Graphics.pas, line 2533. Procedure: GDI Error”

Rgds

Des

[Darren]

The error message I get is:

“Exception “E out of resources” in module Homegate.exe at 000306A5.

Invalid message for a combo box because it does not have an edit control.

Module: Graphics, source; Graphics.pas, line 2533. Procedure: GDI Error”

This is basically the same error.