Keithley DMM6500: How to Create a Bitmap for a Custom App

Why, Jan?

Apps make it possible to change how the instrument operates. It can give a completely different look and feel.

When you are using this for prescribed situations, or in a fixed setup, this can help to have repeatable results.

You can use this to run a set op predefined scenarios, show info in an operator friendly way, show binning info, show tag cards with instructions.

There's a pre-installed app on the device that shows such an instruction card flow, called Instructions.

It's a set of 5 cards that you can scroll to, showing where the main user interface functions are.

Here's an example of one of the instruction cards.

Example

On the Keithley product page for this meter, the source for this app is available via the downloads button.

Let's change that example and replace the first card by a custom one, just to see if it works.

You need to have the image, in PNG format.

An image of 800 * 430 fills the whole width and fits under the title bar.

You have to convert it to BASE64.

Here's a website that can do that conversion online: https://onlinepngtools.com/convert-base64-to-png

Paste the BASE64 content in the application source file that you downloaded from Keithley's website, over the content of the first image.

Put it between these lines of code, replacing anything that was in there originally:

loadimage home intro_DMM
-- paste the content here
endimage
loadimage board2 intro_DMM

Save the script to a USB stick (.tspa extension). Then press the APPS button, and navigate to the USB.

Then select the app, and RUN it.

You'll see the image you created pop up first. When you press the TRIGGER button, it will navigate to the remaining original tag cards.

Home brings you back to your custom image.

If you want to have a look at the original images from the script, you can use this link to reverse from BASE64 to PNG:

https://onlinepngtools.com/convert-base64-to-png