How to create a simple "battery indicator"

Hi!

In my project, we are creating an application for an embedded pc, that wil run on a QVGA screen.

And on that scren the customer want to display two icons, one for memory utilization, and another for disk utilization. They have the following requirements

1) The icons should be simple and easy to see on teh small screen (think cell phone). the background is dark blue so I want to make the icons simple white.

2) It should be visible in 33/66/99 % steps how much is used. Either a fill or show 3 blocks inside the icon.

3) When reaching a critical level, the icon will blink, preferrably change color to a red color (not too dark it must be visible on the dark blue background) and pulse in and out. Like a sinus wave, not a square wave.


Can someone please inform me of how to proceed, I have programmed .NET for many years but never touched the GDI+ part. And it would be nice to make these into a drag/drop component where u set these properties in the dev studio gui also. Which class should I inherit from?

Note that I dont really have that much time to put into this... So taking a 5 day course in GDI+ is off the chart.

Im looking or someone that can point me in a direction, for teh various steps

* the icon itself, like cylinder, box whatever

* the fill mechanism.

* the color change and pulsing blinking notification that something is critical. How do I do this? I have no idea...

perhaps I should just display an animated gif, if that is possible? But it would be much better to make a reusable component. Because I am sure we can use it in other projects.

kind regards
Henrik

Get a graphic program like Photoshop or GIMP and just draw the graphics of your battery stages. Save them as PNGs with a transparent background.

An animated GIF is also DEFINITELY a good idea as well! It saves you the trouble of animating it.

Then, just use them in a PictureBox control. You're not doing anything heavy enough to really need GDI+.
Make it into a nice UserControl. :)

Why not have it be a little more accurate and have 6 indicator levels, one for completely empty and one for each 20%

why not use progress bars?
the blinking can be aninimated with a timer, and I guez this would be a icon tray application...