A Web-Based Graphics Editor For Tiny Screens

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These days, adding a little LCD or OLED to your project is so cheap and easy that you can do it on a whim. Even if your original idea didn’t call for a display, if you’ve got I2C and a couple bucks burning a hole in your pocket, why not add one? Surely you’ll figure out what to show on it as the project develops.But that’s where it can get a little tricky — in terms of hardware, adding a screen just takes running a few extra wires, but the software side is another story. Not only do you have to contend with the different display libraries, but just creating the image assets to display on the screen can be a hassle if it’s not something you do regularly. Enter Lopaka, a graphics and user interface editor for electronic projects created by [Mikhail Ilin].More after the break…Using this web-based tool is pretty simple, you simply load it up, pick the display type you’ve got, and then start using the visual tools to do things like draw shapes and add text. As you work, a window on the bottom will start filling with the source code that you’ll ultimately copy and paste into your project to re-create what you’re seeing.You can import your own images and have them converted to arrays of data, though there’s also a selection of icons that you can select from which might meet your needs. In fact, there’s even a gallery of editable screens and user interfaces that have been created with Lopka if you don’t want to start from scratch.In playing around with the tool, the only annoyance we really noticed was the fact that the source code window isn’t editable. That is, we occasionally tried to code to modify what we were seeing in the visual preview, but it doesn’t work that way. We were somewhat concerned when we saw that the tool also features a paid “Plus” mode, but in truth, the features and capabilities available in the free mode (and what gets unlocked when you cough up the $5.95 a month) seem more than fair.If Lopaka looks similar, it could be because it’s the evolution of a tool offered up specifically for the Flipper Zero that we covered back in 2022. [Mikhail] saw an opportunity to open the tool up to the wider maker and hardware hacker community by adding support for other display types and libraries, which we think was a brilliant move.