Putting Demo Applications in the Third-Party Menu

From Texas Instruments Embedded Processors Wiki

When using the DVSDK, you can add your own demos to the Third-Party Menu by following the steps on this page. Only four demos can be shown at once in the user-interface. If you add more than four demos, the first four in alphabetical order are shown.

1) Create the following files for your demo:

• logo.jpg. This is the logo of the third party company which will be showed next to the demo description. The picture needs to be in JPEG format and of size 50x50.
• readme.txt. This is a text file. The first 40 characters of the file should briefly describe the demo. The demo interface displays up to 40 characters, but stops if it encounters a new line character. For example, the file might contain "Video Phone demo" or "Network Audio demo".
• app.sh. This is an executable that launches your demo. It can either be the demo executable itself or a shell script that executes the executable. (If this is a shell script, make sure its executable bit is set for all). A script could look something like:

#!/bin/sh
exec ./mydemoname

• other files. If app.sh is a shell script, your demo executable will have some other name. You may also need to include data files or other files used by the executable.

Note: The demo application must use relative paths to access any files it needs at runtime. This because the archive is extracted to another location from which the demo is executed.

2) Create a gzipped tar file (ends with .tar.gz) that archives all the files in the previous list. For example, if your files are logo.jpg, readme.txt, and app.sh, you could use the following command:

tar cvzf ti_videophone.tar.gz logo.jpg readme.txt app.sh

Name the tar file using <company>_<demoname>.tar.gz (with no spaces in the file name) as the convention. For example, a video phone demo created by Texas Instruments would be named ti_videophone.tar.gz. The name must be unique since all demos are installed in the same directory.

The three required files must be in the top-level directory of the archive. Other files may be in subdirectories, so long as the demo uses relative references to access them. For example, the following directory structure might be used in the archive:

|-- app.sh
|-- data
|    |-- datafile1
|    `-- datafile2
|-- logo.jpg
`-- readme.txt

To check the format of the file you create, execute the following command in Linux. The result should say "gzip compressed data".

file <filename>.tar.gz 

3) Put your archive in the "thirdpartydemos" subdirectory of the target installation directory. This is where the DVEVM software was installed on the target file system. The default target installation directory is /opt/dvsdk/<platform>, so the default location for demo archives is /opt/dvsdk/<platform>/thirdpartydemos (where <platform> depends on your EVM; for example, it may be "dm365"). Do not extract the contents of the archive in this location. Extraction is performed behind-the-scenes each time the demo is run.

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