Methods for generating graphical displays

[kramaswamy]

Hey all - got a very basic question here, not even looking for answers per se, but more just for any sources of information I can read up on to help me out with this.

I've got an application which controls a robot. The application recieves geographical information, currently in the form of a latitude and longitutde coordinate, regarding where the robot is located at currently. I've also got some reference points, regarding the locations that the robot needs to reach.

What I'm looking to do, is create a very simple interface to go along with the program, with which I can display the robot's current location, and the location of the points it needs to reach. This interface should be updateable at any given time, as the program runs in an infinite loop, constantly updating its current location.

I've used GLUT to generate graphical applications in the past, in my Computer Graphics course, however, one problem I'm seeing with using GLUT, is that it essentially runs in its own loop. I don't want to change the entire program to be self-contained within the GLUT loop, I'd rather have it work the other way around, essentially just calling a function which would update the location currently. I'm pretty sure I "could" use GLUT, but if there's other approaches, I'd like to know about them before I decide which I should use.

If anyone knows any plugins, tools, or reference information I can use to help me out, let me know! I'll be doing my own searching of course, and if I find something particularly useful, I'll post it here myself, incase anyone else is trying to accomplish the same task. Thanks!

[Frederick2]

Just a couple weeks ago I added some code to one of my Windows CE data recorder programs that my organization uses, and what the 'add on' does is record Gps satellite latitude & longitude readings into a data file. The program itself is for recording field data on trees. However, we wanted to have the Gps coordinates saved along with each plot. There was an external library in the form of a dll that I statically linked to, and it exported several functions that I could call to obtain gps coordinates when I wanted them. I didn't want the GPS data collection to interfere with the tree data collection, so I started a seperate thread of execution to collect a user specified number of gps points for averaging while the user was entering other data. What I did was create a timer loop that ran for X number of seconds and collected a point every second. It updated the count into some user memory, and when the count was complete it droped out of the while loop & ended the thread. It works wonderful. Doesn't tie up the machine or anything. It even pops up a window that the user can minimize and go about other things if he/she doesn't want to watch the every second lat/long readings, and the window destroys itself when done. If you want more details let me know.