Running the tutorial

SDC ships with a pageset that is designed to work as a tutorial for the page designer, showing some of the features of the various gauge types. It gives you on-screen instructions for adding and configuring gauges to achieve various effects.

To run the tutorial, there are some prerequisites:

  • SDC must be installed and running properly, with a screen connected. The tutorial is designed for a 1024x600 screen size. If your screen is lower resolution, the tutorial will try to shrink to fit. If the resolution is higher, the tutorial will stay within the 1024x600 area of the screen (bottom left)
  • You must have WIFI connected and working. You can use a wired connection if you have a device that supports it, but obviously this is not a good long term solution for updating pages when the device is installed in a vehicle.
  • You need to have installed the SDC tools and have them able to see the Raspberry Pi’s messages indicating it is alive and on the network.

To access the tutorial:

  1. Power on the Raspberry Pi and wait for the WIFI connection to be established.
  2. Start up SDC Tools, and wait for the Pi to appear in the list
  3. Select the device and press the connect button.
  4. Open the screen designer. Depending on your licence, you may get a warning message at this point. Press OK if you do. The screen designer window will open.
  5. At the top of the screen designer window, drop down the selector and choose “tutorial.xml”
  6. Press the “Use Selected XML” button
  7. Answer “Yes” to the question about rebooting the device.

The device will reboot. SDC Tools will disconnect at this point. After the device has rebooted, the tutorial will start cycling through all of the pages on a 3 second interval. If you select the Pi in the list again and press connect, the tutorial will stop on the currently displayed page. Click on Page 1 in the screen designer to start the tutorial.

Note that the tutorial is locked from saving to prevent it from being overwritten, but if you edit any of the scripts as part of the later stages of the tutorial these will be saved. You can edit all of the pages as per the instructions; you just can’t save the edits you have made. This is largely unmportant when following the tutorial.