Merlin Project

One of the most important parts of any software is the user interface. When it comes to embedded software, it’s even more important that the interface does exactly what it needs to doand only what it needs to do. It should be clear from the beginning whether your system will even need a user interface or not. Embedded systems that do only one task will not need to interact with the user. The simplest forms of user interaction are simple buttons of LCD screens. Buttons will take up room on your embedded system hardware, and must be designed to be reliable.On other embedded devices (like GPS devices or some MP3 players), customers can use a touch screen to interact with the system, choosing where they want to go or what they want to listen to, respectively. This doesn’t take up any hardware space, but is more complex to program. A compromise between these two systems is placing buttons on the edge of the screen, whose meaning changes as the screen does. In this way, you can “recycle” your buttons and use them for different tasks.Some embedded systems are operated remotely. This is obviously the most complex method to set up, but it pays off in the long run, eliminating the need for buttons and graphic displays on the embedded system itself and letting developers create a less-constrained user interface than they would have been able to do otherwise.