Microchip’s Graphics Display Designer X (GDD X) is an enhanced visual design tool that provides a quick and easy way of creating graphical user interface (GUI) screens for applications built on Microchip’s 16-bit and 32-bit MCUs.

Visually Create GUI’s and GDD X generates the application code

1. Easily click and drop widget elements like buttons, sliders, meters and dialog boxes.

2. Commonly used editing tools to reduce the learning curve.

3. Drawing panel based on your target display size for What You See Is What You Get (WYSYWIG) development.

4. Widget specific properties can be conveniently modified for each screen element.

5. Manage the behavior of each widget by adding events and related actions.

6. Multi-screen thumbnails enable quick switching amongst screens to develop the flow of your graphical user interface.

7. General guidance and information on selected screen elements (e.g. memory resource impact, color placement, etc.)

Useful Features

• Creation/Opening/Saving of a project with configurable display resolution

• Draw, resize, and delete screen objects

• Automatic calculation of the X/Y coordinates for on-screen object placements

• Cut, Copy, paste properties

• Thumbnail screen listing

• Alignment of widgets can be done with auto-suggestion or through configurable grid size

• Information box to provide context sensitive information

• Automatic code generation. Code generation imports all required driver/board support files into MPLABX.

• Images/Fonts used in the project can be configurable to Internal/External memory

• Snap to grid feature

Cross Platform Compatibility

Run GDD X on Windows®, Linux® or Mac OS® based machines

GDD X may work on other operating systems, but it has only been tested on the ones below.

a) Windows XP SP2 and Windows 7

b) Linux OS – Ubuntu

c) Mac OS v8

Download Instructions

GDD X can work as plug-in to MPLAB X Microchip’s Integrated Development Environment (recommended) or as standalone (In standalone mode the generated C-Code and include files are required to be added manually  in your project. In the plug-in mode, the generated files and all the Graphics files are added automatically to the selected project. )

Start by preparing your system

• The following software must be installed on user system

1. Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_xx or greater available Here

2. Microchip Graphics Library (v3.06 or greater) available www.microchip.com/MLA

Install GDD X

• To use the GDD X as an MPLAB X IDE plug-in

1. Install MPLAB X IDE v1.60 or greater at www.microchip.com/mplabx

2. Navigate to Tools > Plugins > Updates and select GDD X to install

3. GDD X can then be ran from Tools > Embedded within MPLAB X

• To use the GDD X in standalone mode go to downloads below.

For legacy MPLAB v.8 users download Microchip Graphics Display Designer (GDD) v2.1.1

Note: The GDD v2.1.1 requires the Graphics Library v3.00 (part of Microchip Application Library v2011-06-02 for Windows) or newer, to be installed.
Note: The GDD v2.1.1 requires the latest JAVA Runtime Environment (JRE) to be installed

Note: The GDD v2.1.1 requires MPLAB v8.50 or greater to be installed

To install “Graphics Display Designer v2.1.1” the production release version of GDD go to downloads section