Design and Implementation of Embedded Digital Album

This paper presents a procedure developing a digital album based on an embedded Linux, using Qt, a powerful development toolkit. Being a new-fashioned digital consumable, the digital album considered as fashionable, user friendly and convenient. The mainly functions of the embedded digital album are that reviewing and managing the photos from DC. At the same time, it will include the following functions: to support the multi-format of picture, i.e. JPEG, BMP, and GIF etc; to display the photos as thumbnails; to configure the options of the system, i.e. choose the language of user interface. It also will support an external storage – CF card. When the CF card is inserted, the pictures will be loaded immediately, and display the thumbnails of the photos storing in this card. The hardware platform used in this project is a processor based on Intel´s XScale PXA255, while the software platform is Embedded Linux and the development environment features is Qt and Qt/Embedded. Some key technical problems have been discussed in details, including files scanning, filename list storing, rotation of photos and communication between/inside the modules. Several loading pictures strategies have been compared in terms of time and space, which involves the single-thread & multi-thread, pre-loading and saving thumbnail mechanism, with the detailed test data given, and the optimized strategy has been worked out. The testing data indicated that this digital album system working stably and reliably.