What do you think of the web based designer?

[davetcc]

We really do listen to all feedback around TcMenu. The recent improvements and web-designer itself are based on past feedback.

Please do leave a comment below. Nothing is off the table, negative feedback is appreciated.

[davetcc]

As an update, there is a new version coming soon, it will in my opinion get very close to what desktop designer did, fully supporting round trip and i18n.

[emaayan]

HClock - Copy.emf.txt
i tried uploading my emf to generate code with it, and it said the request was not valid

[davetcc]

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking around making it easier for LLM, for designing menus the above is the easiest way to go, the models can handle that structure easily and extend the menu items.

For capturing the screen, you could register a custom TagVal command that requested a line of the screen, and sent back a binary message of it. That's the only way I can think, if you wanted to do that I'd help out setting it up. It shouldn't be too difficult. It would require either an SPI display with the Data In line available or a framebuffer though.

[emaayan]

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking around making it easier for LLM, for designing menus the above is the easiest way to go, the models can handle that structure easily and extend the menu items.

For capturing the screen, you could register a custom TagVal command that requested a line of the screen, and sent back a binary message of it. That's the only way I can think, if you wanted to do that I'd help out setting it up. It shouldn't be too difficult. It would require either an SPI display with the Data In line available or a framebuffer though.

i'm aware LLM's can use browsers, but i though exposing it via API to an LLM might be easier.

here's an example of what i'm doing right now, where i saw i can't scroll down the TFT screen large menes so claude added paging controls and tested to see if they work, so i just connected a webcam to it.

i have a TFT spi screen.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PqZFsdNONwI

[davetcc]

What I’m saying is though that I wouldn’t include the designer in your workflow beyond plug-in and project setup. From 4.5 onwards you can use initialiser mode. You simply go through designer once and get it to output your menu structure in fluent API within the sketch. You don’t need use designer again unless your hardware changes, and even on hardware change you’d just load up the project, change plugins and generate. It wouldn’t touch the menu code in your sketch.

If you wanted to continue with using designer for the static menu structure, why not get Claude to edit the EMF file before loading it, as it is only json? Just take a backup first.

It is possible to hit the backend directly but there would have to be usage limits on the central server. Maybe 2 request a minute max. It would need a bit of thought how to do this my side. Probably a simple python script.

But there’s also a docker image of the latest release and you can run it yourself locally.

[davetcc]

If you're using touch screen on the TFT, the scrolling support is next on the list, I ran out of time on 5.0 which fixes a fair number of bugs around rendering and input. In 5.1 I'll make sure at least paging works for touch screens. I'll prioritise it first, so you could take patch off the main branch. You'll see here that's all that is left in 5.0.x release milestone. https://github.com/TcMenu/tcMenuLib/milestone/35

[davetcc]

But we're listening, AI workflows are still new, and maybe we've not considered all the options. Initializer is they way I tend to use in new projects. But we started this chat to get real world feedback so we can structure the new versions better.