I'm no artist, so dials are a fair bit off, but I decided to create a basic font (small enough to use with dials in the space I've got to play with). Uppercase and digits only, it's easy to add symbols to though...
I reckon I could get 6 dials in that space. 3 each side. Currently I'm showing 7 lines of text by 55 characters each side. I could get a lot more info in here this way - if only I could read it!
There was a lot of flicker in the text when I first ran this test, so I create a handle to the orginal surface and created my own new one. I refresh my new surface from a copy of the old surface 4 times a second (works well) - flicker has almost gone. (The flicker is because there's 2 apps updating the surface, and I can't coordinate mine against the original - but by taking a regular snapshot I can coordinate when mine gets displayed - in the vertical retrace of the screen (a 47Hz LCD screen) to reduce the flicker.
I am thinking though, with basic line drawing, I can set something up like this:
30C--------------80C--------------130C
OIL-------------------------|
TRN----------------------|
WTR--------------------|
Which would be quite readable. Did I mention, I'm no artist?
